Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period

By Carol Gluck

Ideology played a momentous role in modern Japanese history. Not only did the elite of imperial Japan (1890-1945) work hard to influence the people to "yield as the grasses before the wind," but historians of modern Japan later identified these efforts as one of the underlying pathologies of World War II. Available for the first time in paperback, this study examines how this ideology evolved. Carol Gluck argues that the process of formulating and communicating new national values was less consistent than is usually supposed. By immersing the reader in the talk and thought of the late Meiji period, Professor Gluck recreates the diversity of ideological discourse experienced by Japanese of the time. The result is a new interpretation of the views of politics and the nation in imperial Japan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9780691232676

Book preview

Japan’s

Modern Myths

STUDIES OF THE EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

The East Asian Institute is Columbia University’s center for research, education, and publication on modern East Asia. The Studies of the East Asian Institute were inaugurated in 1961 to bring to a wider public the results of significant new research on China, Japan, and Korea.

Japan’s

Modern Myths

Ideology in the Late Meiji Period

CAROL GLUCK

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS : PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1985 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Gluck, Carol, 1941-

Japan’s modern myths.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. Japan—History—1868-1945. 2. Ideology. I. Title.

DS881.95.G58 1985 952.03 85-600

ISBN 0-691-05449-5

ISBN 0-691-00812-4 (pbk.)

eISBN: 978-0-691-23267-6

R0

For Peter

Acknowledgments

WITH APPRECIATION to Professors Mitani Taichirō, Kano Masanao, Irokawa Daikichi, Takagi Kiyoko, Ariizumi Sadao, Yamamoto Tsu-neo, Saitō Hiroshi and to Tanabe Sadayoshi, Ichikawa Toshiko, and Kawai Satōru and Teiko for counsel and encouragement. With thanks to Kitane Yutaka of the Meiji shinbun zasshi bunko at Tōkyō University, Frank Yorichika of Columbia University’s East Asian library, Togasaki Tamiyo of Columbia and International House libraries, and to Gunji Yukiko and Sakuma Mayumi for help and endless patience. With gratitude to Professors Herbert Passin, Paul Varley, Donald Keene, W. T. de Bary, Gari Ledyard, Bernard Barber, Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, Andrew Fraser, George Akita, J. Victor Koschmann, and especially Herschel Webb for generous reading and conversation. With fond thanks to Deborah Bell, Winifred Olsen, Dorothy Borg, Joan Ericson, and Eric Hyer for fidelity in every sense. With acknowledgment to the Foreign Area Research program of the Social Science Research Council and the East Asian Institute of Columbia University for research support; to Nittsū sōgō kenkyūjo, Kanagawa kenritsu hakubutsukan, Asahi shinbunsha, Mainichi shinbunsha, and Karasawa Tomitarō for the illustrations; to R. Miriam Brokaw for the enthusiasm. And with special recognition to William and Thomas Gluck for walking the dog. To all these both the credit and the indebtedness, to myself alone the faults.

Contents

I. IDEOLOGY AND IMPERIAL JAPAN

The Subject of Ideology3

The Ideological Process9

II. THE LATE MEIJI PERIOD

A Time of Settlement17

A Sense of Nation21

A Complicated Society26

Ideology and Its Time35

III. THE BODY POLITIC

An Unprecedented Ceremony42

The Denaturing of Politics49

The Kan and the Min60

The Gentlemen of the Diet67

IV. THE MODERN MONARCH

Custodians of the Imperial Image73

The Emperor’s Regal Roles83

Local Renderings of the Emperor94

V. CIVIL MORALITY

Morality and Nation102

Patriotism and the Uses of Foreigners127

"The Glory of our Kokutai"138

The Schools and Civil Tutelage146

VI. SOCIAL FOUNDATIONS

Social Fevers157

The Agrarian Myth and Jichi178

Ideologies of Striving and Success204

VII. END OF AN ERA

An Unprecedented Ceremony213

The New Politics of Taishō227

A Parliamentary Ideology237

VIII. THE LANGUAGE OF IDEOLOGY

The Grammar of Ideology247

The Context of Ideology262

Orthodoxy and Diversity275

IX. EPILOGUE: IDEOLOGY AND MODERN JAPAN279

BIBLIOGRAPHY287

NOTES313

INDEX389

Illustrations

(NOTE: Black and white photographs are reproduced to favor historical accuracy over visual quality)

Opposite page 132:

The Emperor Meiji (1888)

The Promulgation of the Constitution (1889)

Detail of the Rescript on Education sugoroku (1891)

Opposite page 228:

Members of the Village Plan Investigation Committee Gathered at the House of Former Village Mayor Hori (Yokota village, Toyama prefecture, 1911)

Picture of Prosperity with Locomotives Running Back and Forth (1889)

Midnight Funeral Cortege of the Meiji Emperor (1912)

Page 196:

Construction of a Village (1927)

Japan’s

Modern Myths

I

Ideology and Imperial Japan

THE SUBJECT OF IDEOLOGY

I

ALTHOUGH no society is innocent of collective notions about itself, some countries have made more of ideology than others. From the time Japan began its deliberate pursuit of civilization in the mid-nineteenth century, ideology appeared as a conscious enterprise, a perpetual civic concern, an affair, indeed, of state. Even as the exigencies of institutional transformation were met in the years following the Restoration of 1868, Japanese leaders expressed their sense that institutions alone were insufficient to secure the nation. It was not enough that the polity be centralized, the economy developed, social classes rearranged, international recognition striven for—the people must also be influenced, their minds and hearts made one.¹

In 1869, one year after the abolition of feudal rule, traveling missionaries were sent to the countryside to proselytize for the new im-perial state. In 1881, a bureaucrat whose own illustrious career was devoted to drafting government legislation, including the Constitution, declared the most urgent national business to be not government ordinances, but inspiration. While the interest of those in power clearly lay in persuading the population to yield as the grasses before the wind, the opposition and others outside the political sphere were no less concerned with their own efforts to arouse the universal sentiment of the people.² From the 1880s through the first fifteen years of the twentieth century, Japanese sought first to conceive and then to inculcate an ideology suitable for modern Japan.

This proved no easy task. Although many believed in the desirability—and indeed the efficacy—of national exhortation, few agreed on its substance. The state missionaries in 1869 had briefly propagated Shintō as the Great Way of the new era; the legal bureaucrat in 1881 preferred Chinese and German learning as the vessels of inspiration. In the eighties and nineties some suggested imperial loyalty and filial piety, others, the Japanese aesthetic tradition, still others, sociology.³ In the early 1900s empire abroad and agrarian values at home were offered as the proper content for civic edification. In Japan, as elsewhere, the process of establishing a national ethos in a changed and changing social setting was a trial-and-error affair. Ideologies of the sort imperial Japan produced were neither created ex nihilo nor adopted ready-made. Without a text or a revelation to serve as a canonical source, views of state and society evolved fitfully, often inconsistently, into changing amalgams of past and present, near and foreign. This fitful and inconsistent process—the making of late Meiji ideology—is the subject of this book.

II

IN BOTH Japanese and Western writing it is often a disagreeable subject, since it quickly brings to mind Japan of the late 1930s and early 1940s. During those years of militarism and war, the Japanese were said to be imbued with the notion that Japan was the land of the gods, inhabited by a people uniquely superior in the world, who lived together, the whole nation as a single family, under the benevolent guidance of a divine emperor.⁴ This picture of a society mobilized by its mythology in service to the national cause was the backdrop against which the subject of tennōsei ideorogii, the ideology of the emperor system, was articulated in the early postwar period. In 1945 and 1946 the Japanese sought to understand the constellation of forces that had brought Japan to war, because they felt, as did their American occupiers, that the past was the obstacle to the future. In order for postwar Japan to begin anew, the first reckoning would be with history. In this turbulent intellectual context attention soon centered on the nature and origins of the prewar emperor system. From Douglas MacArthur to the Japan Communist Party, commentators attempted to identify the elements that had been responsible for the events of Japan’s dark years.⁵

Ideology figured prominently in almost every rendering. Mac-Arthur described the Japanese as having been made abject slaves to mythological fiction, and the Occupation attempted to liberate them from an ideology which contributed to their war guilt, defeat, suffering, privation, and present deplorable condition.⁶ Maruyama Masao began his famous essay of 1946 with a similar reference to enslavement, war, and an ideology which succeeded in spreading a many-layered, though invisible, net over the Japanese people, who had yet to be freed of its hold.⁷ Other Japanese felt the same way, some to a visceral extent. One writer recalled his chest constricting at the mention of the word emperor; the sight of the flag sent spine-chilling tremors through him. The recommended treatment for his "tennōsei neurosis" consisted of an aggressive pursuit of the ideas of the emperor system until they plagued him, and the country, no longer.⁸ Along with the generals, the bureaucrats, the industrialists, and the landlords, ideology assumed a place on the newly compiled list of prewar forces whose power had to be both examined and purged.

In the years since tennōsei ideology first appeared on Japan’s postwar intellectual agenda, differences of interpretation have generated lively dispute among Japanese historians. But as with so many other issues that were defined in the gripping atmosphere just after the war, the essential nature of the problem has not changed. The outlines of the argument are these: tennōsei ideology was the product of the modern emperor system, of the period from 1890, when the Meiji Constitution established the new political structures of modern Japan, until 1945, when these structures collapsed with the surrender. The Meiji government is described as having developed this ideology to legitimate itself and support its modernizing programs. That is, the oligarchs, the bureaucrats, and their ideologues, realizing that some explanation was necessary to secure the cooperation of the people through the rigors of economic development and international expansion, created a state orthodoxy around the figure of the emperor and then imposed it upon the people. The orthodoxy was rigid and flexible at the same time. While its rigidity worked to prevent effective opposition by equating dissent with disloyalty, its vagueness enabled it to adapt its injunctions to different needs, so that sacrifice in war and savings accounts in peace could both be justified in terms of the same national myths. By moralizing and mystifying the nature of the state, politics was depoliticized. All that was required of the citizen was loyal and willing submission, and this he is said to have given as a result of an indoctrination that began in his elementary school years and extended eventually into almost every quarter of his social life. In one of the most common phrases, the people were shackled (sokubaku), and any efforts to escape were met first with intensified propaganda in the years after World War I, and then with increasingly repressive measures that culminated in police control of thought in the 1930s.⁹

For most Japanese writers tennōsei ideology represents both internal psychological constriction and external political submissiveness in prewar Japanese society. Not only did ideological orthodoxy help ultranationalism and militarism to prevail, but, like the war itself, it represents a blight on Japan’s modern experience from which the nation has not fully recovered, even today. The metaphors have changed: what Maruyama called an invisible net became in Irokawa Daikichi’s work an enormous black box into which the Japanese people unknowingly walked.¹⁰ But many of the scholars who study tennōsei ideology still do so for therapeutic reasons: they intend to explore whatever national conditions and predispositions enabled the ideology to take hold in the prewar years, and thus prevent its consequences from occurring again. It is for this same reason that Japanese intellectuals keep vigilant watch over what are called "tennōsei issues" in Japanese politics today. Whether it is the proposal to revive kigensetsu, the anniversary of the legendary founding of the empire and a prewar national holiday, or the move to reinstate government funds for Yasukuni, the shrine of the war dead and an important religious link in the prewar state orthodoxy—any suggestion of ideological recidivism arouses protest and concern.¹¹

Tennōsei ideology, defined and established as a scholarly subject in the months after the war, is thus as much a part of postwar intellectual history as it is a reference to the late Meiji period (1890-1912) during which the ideology gradually emerged. But the view from 1945 backward across the decades conferred on the prewar myths a substantiality that they did not possess in the earlier period. The suppression of the late thirties and wartime years had so solidified the civic dogma that it was naturally assumed to have been cohesive, purposive, and effective from the start. Meiji ideology, or for that matter any ideology that stops short of totalitarianism, would not likely have manifested such characteristics in its formative stages, if indeed it ever did. For ideology, like history, is less thing than process.

III

BEFORE the process can be described, some definition of ideology is required, even if a brief and eclectic one. From the theoretical possibilities available to the late twentieth century student of ideology, I draw the outlines of my subject from an approach common to recent anthropological, sociological, and post-Marxist analyses of the relation between ideas and society. For the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, ideology renders social life significant for those who must live it; by both describing and prescribing, ideology provides maps of problematic social reality without which the societal arrangement would seem meaningless and the individual’s place in it unclear.¹² Any impression that such maps correspond in some geodetic way to the social topography of a given period, however, is misleading. Ideologies not only reflect and interpret the social realities that sustain them; they also, in Berger and Luckmann’s term, construct those realities and remain in constant dialectical relationship with them.¹³ The study of ideology as process concentrates on that relationship, on what Althusser calls "the lived relation between men and their world.¹⁴ Since different people construe their world differently, there is always a multiplicity of ideological formations within a society. The question then arises, which—or whose—set of values and meanings becomes dominant and by what means. Gramsci’s conception of hegemony recognizes that when a social group is successful in persuading others of the validity of its own world view, force does not greatly exceed consent. The consent, moreover, so permeates the society that to many it seems commonsensical, natural, and at times invisible. On the other hand, the means by which this permeation occurs are visible indeed. They include the disseminating institutions, both public and private, which though unconnected in their activities—schools and newspapers, for example—help to construct a shared ideological universe.¹⁵ Finally, though one speaks of ideological discourse as if it were singular and static, it is in fact a plural and dynamic field of ideas and practices within which there are not only continuities and persistent determinations but also tensions, conflicts, resolutions and irresolutions, innovations and actual changes."¹⁶

Although the sources in this selective recitation differ from one another on many points, they have in common certain emphases that are shared here as well. Each considers ideology an essential social element, not an aberration or a contingent excrescence of History.¹⁷ All societies, in short, produce ideologies which in turn help to reproduce the social order. These definitions thus avoid the common, but restrictive, equation of ideology with a systematic and manipulative political program. They further refrain from substituting terms like belief system or national myth in the hope that ideology by any other name would be a different matter. In general, they also relinquish the emphasis on fraudulence that was central to Marx and Engels’ definition of ideology as an inversion of reality and a product of false consciousness.¹⁸ This last characterization, however, is the original source of the Japanese term tennōsei ideorogii, and the pejorative meaning of ideology predominates in Japanese scholarship, even among those who, like Maruyama or Irokawa, do not consider themselves Marxists. Authors who wish to pursue a non-evaluative conception of ideology, which was Mannheim’s grail, occasionally prefer the word shisō (thought), while others may omit tennōsei and use ideorogii alone in a more neutral sense.¹⁹ Still, the content and immediacy of the particular ideology in question have made Japanese writers understandably reluctant to embrace the contention of recent theory that for those who live it, ideology is both real and true. The issue of fraudulence aside, both Japanese and Western writers retain the post-Marxist concern with the social determination of ideas, insisting that ideological formations be tied to the social groups that produce and are produced by them. Despite the abstraction of the terms, ideology does not march disembodied through time, but exists in a concrete and particular social history that has not only dates but also names and faces.

Defined in this way, the subject under consideration here is the interpretation of the political and social world as the articulate elite lived it—or imagined they lived it—in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Japan. Since it is the eventually dominant versions that concern us, the focus is on the establishment and the ascendant social orders that constituted the ideological mainstream of the late Meiji period. Shared ascendancy notwithstanding, they were a diverse lot, whose efforts display no sign of a calculated or consistent ideological vision, but splinter instead into a jumble of contending positions. Often self-appointed to the task, they attempted to formulate views of state and society that they themselves could believe in, and then to persuade others to believe in them as well. Not cynical propagandists, they believed utterly in their depictions. The maps they redrew, partly along old, partly along new contours, were also, perhaps primarily, for themselves. Not theorists either, they addressed themselves to the people, interested less in argument than in suasion and its power to create kokumin (citizens, or countrymen) of them. Moralists, certainly, they were at home in the hortatory mode, which seemed at once comfortingly Confucian and, in the light of the latest Western treatises on moral education, also reassuringly European. They tackled large issues, defining the meaning of law, the place of politics, the role of the new middle class. They attended to details, the proprieties of imperial ceremony, the reading habits of youth, the extravagance of gold-rimmed spectacles. Impelled almost always by an acute sense of crisis, they prefaced their formulations with dramatic expressions of concern with the present state of social or national affairs. In the gap between what they said—the prefectural governors in 1890 deploring the lack of a unifying moral standard—and what they meant—fearing that the advent of party politics in the first election would unseat them—lay a welter of purposes and cross-purposes in the midst of which different groups and their different views contended.²⁰

THE IDEOLOGICAL PROCESS

I

As THIS general characterization suggests, ideologues could be found in many quarters. There was no single group with official, or even unofficial, status as mythmakers to the Meiji state. The so-called government scholars (goyō gakusha) were not court ideologists but academic consultants who prided themselves on their intellectual independence. No one, in short, did ideology for a living. Instead there was an array of people who did something else for a living but took, one might say, an ideological interest—they would have called it public-spiritedness—most often in matters closely related to their work or position. Many were in government, although the leading statesmen who might have been expected to offer guidance in such things seemed, with the important exception of the oligarch Yama-gata Aritomo, generally uninterested. A number of upper and upper-middle level bureaucrats in the central ministries, especially Home, Education, and to a lesser extent, Army, and Agriculture and Commerce, attended diligently to ideological enterprise. Their concerns, however, were various. In the years after the Russo-Japanese War, the army wanted its recruits willing and of good physique, while the Home and Agriculture Ministries wished to keep these same rural youth down on the farm working the ancestral lands instead of running off to the cities, the graveyards of the people.²¹ Not only were the doctrines designed to achieve such ends often at odds with one another, but institutional rivalries and bureaucratic regionalism were often so pronounced that instead of contributing to a single orthodoxy, each part of the government vied to produce its own. Also active were provincial bureaucrats at the prefectural and county (gun) levels, and a whole range of petty officials, village mayors, and other local notables who, even if they passed in and out of local office, neither thought of themselves nor were thought of by others as links to the central government, but as figures of repute in the locality.

Then, with ideology as with foreign policy in the Meiji period, the strongest views—the hard line—often came from outside the government, from the minkan, as it was called, from among the people. Here the people meant journalists, intellectuals, and public figures who produced a disproportionate amount of the public opinion (yoron) of the period. Influential and possessed of a highly developed national consciousness, their interest in ideological issues seldom flagged. They, too, pronounced on the moral and material welfare of the nation, frequently berating a government which was up to its knees in moral education for insufficient attention to the spiritual well-being of the people. They decried materialism, commended patriotism, questioned socialism, and urged Japan on to greater prestige as a world power, filling the ever-expanding volume of commercial publications with quantities of articulate opinion.

There were interest groups, many of them products of the early Meiji institutional changes, such as the organizations of Shintō priests, of educators, of landlords. In confronting their particular crises—for example, the steady decline in the fortunes of Shintō after the first years of the Meiji period—they publicly urged the universal importance of their contribution to national unity, or to social sta-bility, or—as the Shintōists of 1918 reiterated their perpetual claim—to the cause of unifying the spirit of the people.²² Voluntary associations organized for social, economic, or cultural purposes undertook activities in civic education before the central government attempted to coopt them, and afterward as well. The countless societies, study groups, and village organizations pursued their own goals even as the government was instructing them to its purposes.

Government officials, diverse among themselves, thus shared the ideological field with many others in what was a more complex social geography than the term tennōsei ideology might indicate. If there were ideologues—and this study suggests that the term itself is misleading—they were all around, plying different interpretative trades in different social places. In late Meiji Japan, as in other modern societies, pursuing ideology in process means catching individuals and groups in their ideological aspect, of which they were sometimes intently conscious and sometimes intently not.

II

THE SAME is true of the institutions through which versions of ideology were disseminated to their respective audiences. They, too, were diverse and authentically engaged in one activity—educating children, training soldiers, collecting taxes—at the same time that they possessed an ideological aspect that was more or less overt. Among the most overt in this respect were such state institutions as the schools, army, and local government system, as well as the plethora of half-public, half-private organizations which conveyed the impression that imperial Japan was organized from top to bottom, and bottom back to top. Through this hierarchy of interlocking institutions, the wishes of the central government were dispersed to the smallest country hamlet, in what on paper appeared to be the most organized network of social communication imaginable.²³ This of course was precisely the impression that the organizing ministry in question wished to convey, as each claimed full credit for single-handedly mobilizing the nation. Schools, shrines, youth groups, and reservists were each described as the sole effective ideological channel by the part of the government that sponsored them.

To view these channels all together is at least to avoid the pitfall of taking any particular ideological source at its totalizing word. Since the nation that in army documents appears militarized to the last sandal-maker becomes in the annals of the Hōtoku association a country of Sontoku worshippers, it seems wise to remain initially skeptical of grand organizational schemes. This is all the more true when the different institutional hierarchies were claiming the time and commitment of the same people. One suspects that if a farmer had attended the meetings of the score of associations in which his membership was postulated by the Home Ministry in the years after the Russo-Japanese War, he would have had little time left to perform the social tasks assigned him by these various local and national organizations, much less to tend his fields. In fact we know from the laments of provincial officials that local associations competed unsuccessfully for attendance at their meetings by providing saké or food—or the latest magic lantern show—to enliven the prospect of lectures on economic self-help through the raising of leghorns.²⁴ Audiences tended to be limited and self-selected, and more often than not the lecturers were preaching to the converted. Although this did not necessarily dilute the impact of the message, it suggests a more focused, less total communication than the central bureaucratic sources habitually claimed.

Existing social relations continually interfered with the smooth transmission of ideological messages from the government through its putatively subordinate hierarchy. Moreover, new institutions, once in existence, created their own demands and ideological strategies for self-preservation. The much extolled organs of local self-government (jichi) possessed ideological concerns of their own, some reinforcing, others conflicting with those of the central government. Schoolteachers in charge of creating the next Japanese (daini no kokumin) soon acquired as strong an allegiance to their profession as to the government whose citizen-making interests they were hired to serve.²⁵ The institutional agents of late Meiji ideology were then, and often still are, imagined as conduits through which civic information passed unimpeded to its intended audience. But, neither empty nor direct, the conduits had all manner of kinks in them. Reflecting local economic interests and social relations or alternative views of the shape civilization ought to take, those whom the government appointed as the social custodians of ideology on the local level were not, in a word, reliable. Most strikingly, the local elite (meiboka, yu-shisha), who were claimed by nearly every government ministry as the pillars of its ideological activity in the localities, were often the same entrepreneurial landowners from whose ranks the expanding political parties were gathering their support.²⁶ Yet to the Meiji bureaucrat in his ideological aspect, party politics was anathema.

Nor were government-sponsored institutions the only purveyors of ideology to the late Meiji population. This was a period of rapidly growing transportation and communication, of an ever more widely diffused press and an expanding printing industry, which published an annual average of nearly 27,000 book titles between 1905 and 1913 (in 1913 only Germany published more titles than Japan; the United States approximately half as many) and produced between 1,500 and 2,000 different magazines in the same period.²⁷ Increased literacy, a result of the national compulsory education system established in the 1870s, meant that growing numbers of younger Japanese were exposed to a wide diversity of opinion. Travel broadened, entertainment beckoned, and the sources of education proliferated. New private institutions such as the political parties and old ones such as the family responded to the times, seeking self-perpetuation with versions of their own importance directed to their members or to society at large. These institutional channels for the dissemination of ideology were thus multiple in number and conflicting in intent. Partial proof of this was the perennial preoccupation with ideological unity. Like sumptuary laws in the Tokugawa period, which were promulgated so often that their reiteration alone casts doubt on their effectiveness, the continued concern with ideology suggests that had the efforts at influence (kyoka) gone smoothly, no one need have dealt so copiously with the matter.

III

WITH this thought, the outline of ideological process proceeds to those for whom the impressive range of interpretative effort was ostensibly conducted—the kokumin, the countrymen, themselves. For any full history of ideology would necessarily include both the ideologists and the ideologized. Yet the weight of evidence is on the side of the producers, who were by nature expressive and voluble. It is they who tell us of whom and to whom they were speaking. From them one glimpses a hierarchy of ideological value, general and specific versions of civic practice, high, middle, and mass versions, hints or guides (kokoroe) for the farmer, the soldier, the rural youth, the taxpayer, the wife and mother. There was something for nearly everyone, though not quite. Unlike the farmers for whom acres of exhortation were cultivated, the growing urban population and the new industrial working class, though they aroused great fear and concern, received little direct ideological attention. That they were slighted is significant, since it helps to explain the nature and the consequences of the ideology that slighted them.

But did the people spoken of by bureaucrats and moralists exist? Or more precisely, did the rural youth imagined by the proponents of social education in the early 1900s hear what was spoken in their behalf? The view from Tōkyō—across the endless vistas of bureaucratic or journalistic paper—suggests a society saturated with ideology, as if no one could have failed to be aware of the civic mission being urged on him by one or another proselytizer from the center. One way to test this perspective is to trace the movement of ideological language from its sources through the institutions of its dissemination to its targets, recognizing always that such sources were as apt to reside in the provinces as in the capital. Some subjects faded from view by the time they reached the village, where silkworms were likely to take precedence over kokutai as a topic of lively interest. Sometimes the words and symbols remained the same, but were understood differently in a different social context. In Tōkyō, intellectuals and legal scholars theorized about the deterioration of the family system, quoting from the Confucian Great Learning and John Ruskin, for they feared that a deteriorated family would mean rampant individualism.²⁸ In Tōhoku villages the same phrase meant something more specific: eldest sons were leaving home for the city, and farms and families were going under. If in this instance the ideological messages were reinforcing, in other cases the same groups would receive contradictory counsel. While concord in the community was a constant preachment, so also were Social Darwinist doctrines of competition and personal striving. The rural youth who heard the litany of wa (harmony) were equally roused by the call to seizon kyōsō (the struggle for survival). Often, of course, their minds were on something altogether less edifying, variously described—and decried—as the natural desires for economic success, larger vistas, and more fun, all of which led them to take the unnatural step of departing the countryside for the city.²⁹ Although the rural youth may have heard the sermons of social education, they clearly heard a great many other things as well.

Without some notion of what these other things were, ideology is deprived of its social environment, over-isolated and over-dramatized. It is not enough to trace ideology outward from its human sources, whether those sources are national, local, or within the family. As long as one attends to those who produce it, ideology will appear in every corner, filling the villages, classrooms, and households with billowing vapors of influence. And indeed in the postwar world, tennōsei ideorogii was retrospectively likened to a kind of all-enveloping gas.³⁰ From the view of the people who occupied those corners, however, the late Meiji air swirled with social currents, of which ideology was but one, and a far less important one than its propounders were likely to admit. Here the ideologists can, inadvertently, be helpful, since they were constantly taking the public pulse, usually to find that it was weak in national spirit. This threat-ening faintness they expressed in a revealing vocabulary of ideological failure, lamenting the indifference to their words, which—in the most literal of several locutions—like the east wind in a horse’s ear (baji tōfū), hardly grazed the people’s consciousness. Because these commentators then went on to identify in colorfully censorious detail the baleful influences to which the people were not indifferent, they offer indirect evidence of other currents of late Meiji social, economic, and political life that competed with the ideologists for popular attention.

To develop some sense of the fuller canvas and the place of ideology on it, one looks to sources that are not, properly speaking, ideological in content. That is, they do not consciously propound a civic view, though they may indeed express one. Village plans (ze), teachers’ reports, statistical surveys, political speeches, diaries, memoirs, popular songs—all offer an opportunity to view the late Meiji experience in a frame larger than the ideologists were wont to supply. They provide a perspective similar to that derived from reading newspapers of the period, which themselves constitute an important source for this study. By embedding ideology more evenly in its context, such sources reduce the disproportionate importance it has for its creators, and, inevitably, for its analysts as well. As an analyst drawn like filings to his subject’s magnet, I have not escaped this distortion. Ideology, as it is consciously practiced, still looms larger in studies of ideology than it did in the lives of those for whom it was conceived. Nonetheless, it is occasionally possible to recreate some notion of the ideological view from society at large. This means casting about for as many bits and pieces of social information as possible, conducting an almost phenomenological inquiry into discourse as the late Meiji Japanese experienced it. One wants to know not only how the imperial house was conceived and portrayed in its modern role, but also how the emperor appeared to the people; and, further, not only how the people were exposed to the imperial symbol and person, but also to what else they were exposed at the same time. Ostensibly non-ideological sources help to situate the civic roles being urged on the people in the context of the rest of their social life, surrounding data of ideological consciousness with the ideas and values that continually competed, reinforced, and conflicted with them. This is particularly important, since a conspicuous characteristic of the ideological process described here is the degree to which influences outside the control of the conscientious ideological producers affected the universe of shared meaning that gradually emerged in the course of the period.

IV

HOW SUCH shared meanings arose remains a question. Thus far the argument has emphasized diversity, not consensus. A range of ideologues, genuinely concerned with civic edification, produced multiple, contending views of the late Meiji world. The institutions through which these views were disseminated were equally diverse, their audiences varied. The process itself was uncontrollable. Bureaucrats and publicists responded to reality as they perceived it, with prescriptions designed to serve social or national purposes as they understood them. Their ideas once articulated became public property, social facts in themselves, to be manipulated and communicated in many partial and mutually conflicting ways. Kokutai, the concept of a mystical national polity, was turned to many uses; the call for effective local self-government at times rebounded against the interest of the central ministries that originated it. Moreover, much else was happening in the social, economic, and political spheres that caused mutations and divagations unimagined by those who toiled tirelessly in ideological activity.

How then was hegemony wrested from a process which upon close scrutiny appears anything but unified in purpose or cohesive in presentation? The answer depends on a looser construction of ideological discourse than the term tennōsei ideorogii suggests. If the dis-course is understood to have been diverse within itself, the hegemony plural, then orthodoxy was one element in a dispersed ideological field. Just as it was produced by fits and starts, trials and errors, in the latter part of the Meiji period, so were a number of other versions of reality as it was and ought to be. Some of these, like socialism, were excluded from the dominant view as unacceptable, and were suppressed. But most coexisted, overlapped, or interacted with one another, so that rather than a single ideology, there were several ideologies, each in a constant process of mutual adjustment and change.

Despite the insinuation into the prose of general nouns like ideologues and ideology, the premise here is that neither possessed quite the existential presence that these words imply. Not modern ideology, then, but a congeries of ideologies was the field in which hegemony arose. Indeed the areas of shared agreement, as well as those of shared tension, often appeared in the spaces between the ideological versions, where they seemed so commonsensical as not to merit any comment at all. Who disputed the value of progress, for example, or doubted the moral ambiguity of politics in its modern form? Such views, generalized and naturalized slowly in the course of Japan’s modernization, certainly possessed as great a historical significance as the more obtrusive, but often less widely or deeply held, doctrines of the emperor system orthodoxy.

Both are important, however, and most important is the process by which such views were socially created and absorbed. Perhaps because imperial Japan’s ideology, like the country itself, developed in comparative isolation, it has frequently appeared unique. One assumption here is that the general process just described is common to complex modern societies, however different the contents of their ideological formulations. On the other hand, no abstract account of ideological process explains the content of a particular ideological form. For that, historicity is responsible. Because Japan’s modern myths were made in and from the Meiji period, only the Meiji period can finally account for the nature of the ideologies it generated.

II

The Late Meiji Period

A TIME OF SETTLEMENT

ALTHOUGH it makes ready historical sense that ideologies take time to develop, it is less clear why the particular time in the case of modern Japan should have been the late Meiji period. In 1868 the Meiji Restoration had inaugurated the modern imperial state with the symbolic return of rule to the emperor. Yet what is now called emperor system ideology did not begin to emerge in earnest until around 1890. The delay is sometimes explained in terms of the country’s being too caught up in the demanding work of modernization to bother excessively with political rationalizations or civic blandishments. The concern was there, but not as pressingly as the other items on the agenda for civilization that Japan had drawn up from largely Western sources.

Narrative accounts often characterize the first two Meiji decades (1868-1887) as the pragmatic—and dramatic—years. Epoch-making political developments included centralization, conscription, tax reform, the movement for parliamentary government, and the drafting of a constitution. Social change, too, had been considerable, with the legal leveling of the classes, compulsory elementary education, westernization, leaps in material culture, and increased stature for the rural agricultural elite. Industrialization on a strong agrarian base, an aggressively entrepreneurial private sector, the chastening experience of the government deflation in the early 1880s—Japan’s capitalist economy began to take shape during the same period. There would be accelerations and setbacks, but by 1890 the direction of the economy was clearly set. Equally under way was the development of the national infrastructure: railroads, communications, financial institutions. Even in the sphere of international relations, where the momentous events lay ahead, the object of the exercise had been clear since the unequal treaties were signed in the late 1850s. It was almost as if the early Meiji scenario for gaining parity with the West were being played out in a late Meiji world, so that treaty revision, the victories over China and Russia, and the alliance with Britain seemed both the successful conclusion to a past quest as well as a departure in imperial power for the future. In all of these areas, then, the development of the structures and directions of Japan’s modernity belonged to the first half of the Meiji period.

While it is true that the early Meiji elite were occupied with the pursuit of what they knew as civilization, they were by no means indifferent to ideology. For even if we now cause the people to run day and night, we shall not overtake the West in less than a few decades. If such is the case, how much longer will it take if they waste a day each week? The day in question was Sunday, which if spent in excess and dissipation would account for 1,500 lost days in a mere thirty years, a total of four years and one month of days and nights.¹ Impelled by this and other more consequential concerns, enlightenment intellectuals in the 1870s sought to edify the people to prepare them for all aspects of civilization, save perhaps its Sundays. Government leaders who insistently reiterated that the customs and feelings of the people (Jūzōku ninjo) were insufficiently developed to allow for popular sovereignty were, of course, making an equally ideological point.² So were the Shintō missionaries in their short-lived heyday in the early seventies. Longer-lived and more important were the slogans that rang through that decade and beyond: fukoku kyōhei, a wealthy nation and a strong army, shokusan kbgyb, encouraging industry, and bunmei kaika, civilization and enlightenment. These phrases were repeatedly wielded as emblems and instruments of national policy during the years of turbulent institutional change. And institutions like the school system and the army were in part conceived, as Yamagata put it, with the thought that in due course, the nation will become one great civil and military university.³ From the time the Meiji period began—and in fact well before that—pragmatics had never wholly overwhelmed the urge to influence the population.

Nonetheless, the late 1880s marked an upsurge in ideological activity. The scale changed; more people spoke to the issue, in government, in the opposition, in the press, in the schools, in the provinces. They also spoke to more people, and with greater urgency. To take the speakers at their word, they were prompted in part by a surfeit of change. The nation’s eager reach for Western models seemed sometimes to exceed its grasp, as change followed change in the government’s attempt both to establish new institutions and also to maintain control of them. Government directives have so often changed or dismantled village administration since the Restoration that it makes a strange historical tale. Moreover, continued Inoue Kowashi in 1886, this institutional fickleness made it difficult to cultivate the spirit of self-government.⁴ By 1890 the local government system had undergone three major reorganizations, in 1871-1872, 1878, and again in 1888-1889, with minor changes in between. In 1891 landlords in the northern provinces, though they could discern no clear advantage of the new system over the old, urged that it not be changed again, but left in place long enough for people to become accustomed to it.⁵ The same was said of education ordinances, which, it seemed, had necessarily to receive some revision or alteration with every change of education minister. How then could the principles of national education be fixed?⁶ This plaint was common outside the government in the late 1880s, in the press, and also in the localities, which, together with the pupils’ parents, bore much of the cost of the new compulsory education. Since the original education act of 1872, administrative and curricular change had been dizzying. An administrative structure was first established in 1872 on the highly centralized French model. It then moved in the space of one year (1879) to American-style local control, returned to national intervention in 1880 (though without national subsidies), changed slightly in 1885, and substantially in 1886, to a hybrid European statist system which featured German influence. The elementary curriculum had meanwhile shifted from Anglo-American egalitarian emphasis on the individual intellect, with textbooks literally translated from Willson’s Readers or Wayland’s wisdom, to a mixture of Confucian and European elitism and moral emphasis that used texts ranging from the most ancient Analects to the latest Herbartian example.⁷

The civil code went through draft after Napoleonic draft from 1871 until 1888, only to be rejected after its long-delayed promulgation in 1890. Legal debate, which pitted French against British concepts of civil law and both against indigenous custom, spilled over into public controversy. At issue were the boundless changes that have attended the reforms in every quarter since our country emerged from feudalism. European models threatened to overwhelm our distinctive ways and customs, which, such commentators always lamented, had yet to be determined. Moreover, few suggested that they had been determined when, in 1898, a civil code, now based on thoroughly German models, was finally put into effect.⁸ Since the 1870s, the army had also moved from a French to a Prussian system with major institutional changes occurring again in 1886-1889; the draft law alone underwent a handful of revisions between 1873 and 1889. In 1891 it was suggested that Chinese naval superiority was due to the Ch’ing having single-mindedly modeled its navy on England, while Japan had "no stick-to-itiveness (mikka bozu). Last year it learned from France, this year from England, its military drill in constant flux."⁹ All these institutional changes—and more—aroused a crescendo of comment in the late 1880s, which called for some fixing and securing of the national sentiment.

In this sense the ideological seizure at the end of the eighties was partly a response to what one contemporary commentator described as the thunderboltism of the first two post-Restoration decades.¹⁰ The late Meiji period was less a time of upheaval than one of settlement, less of structural drama than functional adjustment, a time when change was absorbed and some sort of stability was wrested from the aftermath of crisis.¹¹ The ideological effort to pin things down was one part of this process. But it was by no means a simple reaction, either to the turbulent recent past or—as it is so often suggested—to the westernization that had characterized it. It is a trivial-ization of their task to regard the ideologists as anti-Western, which the majority emphatically were not, or as apostles of a return to the past, which had little hold on most of them. In fact, the anti-Western reaction of the eighties and early nineties was more complex than the general accounts indicate, both in its socioeconomic origins and its ideological impact. The local movements to boycott Western goods, for example, which were instigated by Sada Kaiseki and his essay on Lamps and the Ruination of the State (Ranpu bdkokuron) in the early 1880s had involved a Buddhist defense of the faith against Christianity and Copernican theory, as well as an anti-establishment call for self-help in villages suffering the economic consequences of civilization. ¹² This was worlds apart from the interests of such local groups as the Turning the Tide Society (Kairansha), which was founded in 1889 to preserve the Japanese spirit against indiscriminate Europeanization. These provincial men of substance, most of them in Western dress, styled themselves progressive conservatives and, cherishing the establishment, gathered together to debate the abolition of prostitution, the spirit of independence, Mt. Fuji, Lake Biwa, and patriotism.¹³ A newly rising, self-consciously forward-looking middle-class elite, the ideologists were themselves the frequent targets of satirical anti-westernism, their coats and trousers mocked, their beer, brandy, vermouth caricatured in song.¹⁴ In any case, by 1890, too much had changed; there was no possibility of going home again. It was partly because so many recognized this—some with fear, others with anticipation—that the ideological momentum gathered as it did in the late 1880s.

A SENSE OF NATION

I

THERE WERE, however, more direct reasons for the late Meiji outbreak of concern with civic definition. Begun years before in the feudal domains, the long efforts to reconceive the state were finally reaching their institutional culmination. And for those who lived through it, the decade of the eighties had a headlong forward thrust. For every backward glance toward the changes that had transpired in the recent past, there were scores of eyes fixed upon the future, in particular on the year 1890, when the first elected national assembly would inaugurate a new political system. In later years historians concluded that the important moments of structural transition from early modern to modern Japan had occurred in the first two decades of the Meiji period. But in the late 1880s, the social and political elite anticipated that the momentous national events lay just ahead. The promulgation of the Constitution in 1889 would establish the state (rikkoku), and whatever else it might bring, the opening of the Diet in 1890 would confirm Japan as a nation among civilized nations (bunmeikoku no ikkoku). It was this perception of a beginning that lit the fires of action and opinion—and with them the flare of ideology—in the latter part of the eighties. The subject of change, too, was often presented in this light. If the state were to be established, institutionally and ideologically, then it was time, people said, for imperial Japan to make up its collective mind.

The propulsion toward 1890 gathered variably through the decade—earliest and most doggedly within the central government. In 1881 the oligarchs had promised a constitution and a national assembly. They then spent much of the next nine years making the legal and political provisions necessary to insure that the beginning of parliamentary government would not mean the end of their bureaucratic dominance. A good number of the institutional thunderbolts that came to seem excessive were hurled by the government as part of its race against the day when it would have to share power with the parties. Heightened signs of ideological concern within the government began to appear in the early eighties as well. Yamagata, who was already given to fretting over the effects of politics on the hearts and minds of youth, spoke increasingly often of the preparations for constitutional government. It was, he later said, like busily making ready for a journey, one that seemed to him to be fraught with peril. The nearer the constitutional apocalypse, the more he expressed the need to strengthen the basis of the nation, both institutionally and spiritually.¹⁵

As the decade progressed, momentum also gathered outside the government. By the late eighties the imminence of the year 1890 seemed, as it were, to hang in the air. For those who expected in some way to be affected by—or to affect—the beginning of constitutional government, the years from 1886 through 1890 were characterized by a sense of both promise and urgency. Opposition parties, though they continued to suffer government suppression, regrouped. Employing the familiar vehicle of protest against the government’s soft foreign policy, movements against the latest proposals for treaty revision spread across the country