The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 6 | Article ID 2792 | Jun 01, 2008

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The Cultural Career of the Japanese Economy: Developmentaland Cultural Nationalisms in Historical Perspective

Laura Hein

The Cultural Career of the JapaneseEconomy: Developmental and CulturalNationalisms in Historical Perspective

Laura Hein

This essay explores the connection between theeconomy and cultural identity in Japanesenationalism. After World War II Japan was apacesetter in the global trend towarddevelopmental nationalism, including atransformation of its economy into both awealthy and a highly egalitarian one. In the1970s and 1980s, ethnic nationalism re-emerged, with the claim that economic successwas the product of Japanese culturaluniqueness rather than of the developmentalnationalist policies of the previous quarter-century. The economic downturn of the 1990sthus challenged Japan both economically andculturally, At first, this crisis prompted acritical re-evaluation of national culture,manifested as serious attempts to both resolvetensions with Asia dating from World War IIand dismantle domestic social hierarchies. Bythe mid-1990s, however, this moment hadpassed and government and business leadersadopted full-fledged neo-liberal policies,reversing the long post-war trend towardincome equality, while adopting a more stridentand militarist cultural nationalism.

This is the second in a two-article series ondevelopmental and cultural nationalisms. Seethe accompanying essay by Radhika Desai,Developmental and Cultural Nationalisms inHistorical Perspective

Japan’s modern history is unusual in Asiabecause it was the only Asian country toachieve advanced industrial status in the firsthalf of the twentieth century. Before World WarII, it did so through intensive exploitation of thecountryside and imperial conquest. After thewar, the Japanese re-built their economy alongfar more egalitarian lines. Nonetheless, whilenationalists in Asia faced many of the sameconditions and incorporated many of the sameelements into their ideas and practices as didtheir European counterparts, they jointlystruggled with the proposition – energeticallyexported from Europe – that modern nationalpower was somehow uniquely the birthright ofEuropeans. After defeat in World War II, Japandeveloped a distinctive and powerful version ofdevelopmental nationalism, although this gaveway in later decades to cultural nationalism.Like cultural nationalisms elsewhere, not justin Asia, Japanese cultural nationalism, in bothits optimistic and pessimistic forms, hasprovided justifications for social hierarchy andeconomic inequality, both at home andinternationally. Cultural nationalism typicallyhas operated in a way that undercutscommitment to equality of individuals, both athome and internationally. By contrast,arguments for Japan’s normality in the modernworld have not been as susceptible to this usehistorically. [1]

Pre-surrender nationalisms

Modern Japanese nationalism, as elsewhere,emerged within the eighteenth and nineteenthcentury contexts of globalizing capitalism andimperialism. After establishing a modern statein 1868, and successfully warding off the

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danger of being colonized, the Japanese begana particularly intensive period of inventingnational traditions, drawing on their rich andlengthy indigenous culture. As in most places,the Japanese national project involvedhomogenizing and subordinating peripheralregions and people. While this pattern wasnearly universal , Japan’s part icularcircumstances were unusual, meaning that insome ways, Japan resembled the colonizedworld, in other ways early ‘late developers,’such as Germany, and in yet others, imperialmetropoles. Japanese nationalists shared withother non-Westerners the need to confront thefact that Europeans justified and explainedtheir dominance by overt racism. Most latenineteenth and early twentieth-centuryJapanese were dismayed by Western power andthought of themselves as disadvantaged in therace for development by being Asian. Japaneseleaders also shared with other late developersthe challenge of coping with a technologicallysuperior capitalist core, which they respondedto by emphasizing very state-centred strategiesof modern economic development. Indeed,scholars of Japanese nationalism have generallyagreed that state-centred nationalismdominated over nationalism imagined aroundan ethnic community.[2] Japanese modernitywas also imperialist and, as in other imperialcountries, imperialism and nationalism weremutually constitutive.[3]

Wartime US image of the Japanese

Rather than the experience of being colonized,pre-war Japanese shared with other Asians thefear that the process of modernization mightdestroy what they defensively came to think ofas the national cultural soul. Anxiety may be atthe heart of all nationalisms, but outside theWest, its characteristic form is a fear that theprice of modernity is Westernization andconsequent loss of cultural authenticity.[4] AsDipesh Chakrabarty has argued for India,modern economic thought, like all scientificsystems, was a double-edged sword because itoffered Asians ‘simultaneous indispensabilityand inadequacy’: its universal laws imply acommon destiny while also suggesting thatAsian societies were fundamentally inadequatebecause they were not culturally Western.[5]

More precisely, the great fear among pre-warJapanese intellectuals was that Japan waslosing its cultural identity without fullyattaining modernity, creating a deformedhybrid, one that meant continued privation and

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hampered all chances of normal development.Anxiety over this possibility rose to the level ofa cultural panic in the early 1930s in bothpopular and scholarly thought in Japan,influencing the futures of both developmentaland cultural nationalisms.

Pre-surrender Japan thus occupied an unusualmiddle ground. Although, unlike the colonizedworld, the Japanese had consistently prevailedon the field of battle and had established aviable industrial economy by 1918, they werestill denied entry on equal terms to the salonsand scientific laboratories of Europe orcitizenship as immigrants to North America.Nor were they ever able to fully control theirAsian conquests. That historical experience ofsustained military victories and racial exclusionexplains much of the specific nature of interwarJapanese anxiety over national identity.

Manchuria Train--Japan's most advancedlocomotive at the time, it representedhopes that industrial development inManchuria would modernize the Japaneseeconomy

The question of whether capitalism wassuitable for Japan lay at the heart of muchinterwar debate and most proponents ofJapanese exceptionalism claimed that it did not.Some celebrated Japanese rural social relationsas ‘beautiful customs’ that were beingdestroyed by the inroads of capitalism andselfish individualism. They hoped thatrebuilding Japanese agriculture, devastated byrapid changes in global commodity markets inthe 1920s and 1930s, would also revitalisenational culture. Their cultural analysis muchresembled that of romantic fascists everywherein the 1920s and 1930s, but theorists whoemphasised the uniquely Japanese bondbetween the Emperor and his subjects and theequally unique traditions of the Japanese ruralfolk rarely acknowledged the resemblance. [6]

1930s Income inequality was particularlypronounced between urban and ruralareas. Here two rural women preparesilkworm cocoons

Other wartime economic policymakersexplicitly sought to build on utopian and

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technocratic fascist ideas to invent a distinctiveJapanese modernity, one that celebrated anauthoritarian imperial state and rationalisedand centralised the economy. The planners atthe South Manchurian Railroad ResearchDepartment, for example, called for an ultra-modern economy in the colonies in order totranscend what they saw as the deeply flawedeconomy of the homeland.[7]

Early Post-war Analyses

In 1945 many people recognised that belief inJapanese uniqueness had not only provided ajustification for going to war but also hadpropelled some of the most disastrous militarydecisions. For example, key strategists withinboth the Army and Navy had planned victory onthe basis of ‘Yamato spirit,’ undervaluing theimportance of re-supplying ships or providingair support for troops. The delusional nature ofwartime thought rather than poverty nowbecame the new central exhibit in the case forJapanese deformed modernity. The experienceof living under a regime that had rejectedreality meant that most Japanese were readyfor significant change and so provided theopportunity to transform economic institutions,such as farmland ownership patterns andindustrial relations practices, that had givensmall numbers of Japanese so much power overall the others. In other words, the immediatepost-war era was the high point both fordevelopmental nationalist policies and foroptimism that Japan could move toward normalmodernity.

Toward the end of the Asia Pacific War,civilians were told to protect the homeislands with sharpened bamboo stakes,epitomizing the insistence that nationalspirit could overcome a dearth ofresources

Japan developed a distinctive and powerfulversion of developmental nationalism in thefirst decade after World War II. During thistime, the sense of Japanese uniqueness thathad undergirded pre-surrender nationalism wasmuted in favour of an emphasis on what Japanhad in common with the rest of the advancedindustrial world. Early postwar governmentscommitted to an economic strategy based onhigh wages, high labour productivity, and apeace-based economy, none of which hadcharacterised pre-war Japan.[8] They laid thefoundations for the developmental nationalistapproach that characterised Japan for the nextquarter-century, leading to both high-speedeconomic growth and to the extraordinaryreduction of poverty over the next threedecades. These priorities reflected a globalpostwar trend toward policies that PeterKatzenstein has called ‘tamed capitalism,’ orpolicies that harnessed the market.[9] Typicallythese modernizing developmental nationalistscriticized older national traditions forenshrining social and cultural hierarchies andalso pursued policies that promoted socialequality.

By the 1960s, Japanese views of the nature of

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Japanese capitalism were profoundly affectedboth by this new international contextepitomised by the Cold War and by theexperience of high-speed economic growth. By1970, even the economic thinkers who focusedon the ‘dual economy’ [niju kozo], ‘distortionsof growth’ [keizai seicho no hizumi], anduneven development, such as Arisawa Hiromi,treated these conditions as normal problems tobe managed rather than evidence of uniquecultural impediments to modernity. Risingstandards of living and diminishing povertylevels fuelled optimism that such impedimentscould be overcome. Economic equality seemedto be evolving from a tamed form of capitalismto a welfare-state system. Most economiccriticism now came from individuals such asTsuru Shigeto, Miyamoto Ken’ichi, and UzawaHirofumi, who offered an environmentalcritique of the ‘production-first’ bias of Japan’sdevelopmental nationalism while still remainingsympathetic to its other dimensions.[10] Mostof them also combined criticisms of Japan withcriticisms of the United States, demonstratingthat capitalism itself rather than deviantJapanese culture was the chief problem as theysaw it. In other words, post-war economictheorists remained highly critical of the ruralpast, as did other developmental nationalistsaround the world, but, since the countrysidewas rapidly being integrated into urbanprosperity, the question of why it had been sopoor no longer engaged people as intensely.Moreover, both celebrants and critics ofJapan’s economy in the 1960s and early 1970streated the contemporary Japanese economy asnormal rather than deviant, regardless of theirviews of the pre-surrender years.

The Tokyo Labor College was one of themany institutions created after the war inorder to promote more equitable economicdevelopment than had existed before

The Return of Unique Japan

Theories of Japanese uniqueness nevercompletely disappeared, however. While theywere muted in the 1950s and 1960s whendevelopmental nationalist strategies were inthe ascendant and exceptionalism was moststrongly associated with wartime disaster, theinternational climate changed again in themid-1970s, sparking a combustible mix ofnationalist anxiety and pride. The two ‘oilshocks’ and U.S. President Richard Nixon’sresumption of diplomatic relations with China,which he pursued without informing Japan,reminded the Japanese that the internationaleconomic and political environment could stilldeliver nasty surprises.

Japan’s phenomenal rise in the global economicarena meant that these issues seemedsurmountable, but they did send many peoplein search of new ways to explain Japan tothemselves and the world. The popular press inparticular responded with a profusion ofNihonjinron analyses of Japanese uniqueness inthe 1970s and 1980s. Nihonjinron literaturereverted back to the pre-war argument thatJapan was blessed by being fundamentally

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different from elsewhere, although now thefocus was on the economy and resolutely not onthe state, which would have brought attentionback to the disaster of the war. Significantly,cultural nationalism in Japan of the 1970s and1980s, like postwar developmental nationalismbefore it, still operated by sublimating militaryaspirations rather than by representingthem.[11]

Why did these arguments flourish? Nihonjinrondiscussion was rarely rigorously comparative(primarily because analytic rigor would haveshredded the argument beyond repair). But itcould tap anxiety about Japan’s historicaldeviance, which had remained dormant duringthe 1950s and 1960s, but flared up in responseto new challenges in Japan’s internationalenvironment. The alacrity with which foreignjudgments about Japan have been translated,discussed, accepted, and refuted within thedomestic Japanese public sphere suggests thatthe spark for this anxiety is transnational.Japanese nationalism has always developed indialogue with the outer world. Fear thatJapanese would never be fully welcome was anabiding source of anxiety, and a recurrenttrigger for assertions of difference.[12]Moreover, the turn to cultural nationalisms waspart of a global historical movement.

Cultural nationalism in the 1970s and1980s celebrated the unique nature ofsuch traditions as sumo wrestling,including the hierarchical "stable" systemand such rituals as participants' specialdiet

In Japan the connection between economicinequality and the rise of cultural nationalismwas far less pronounced because incomes hadconverged so much in the early post-wardecades. Indeed, postwar Japanese culturalnationalism developed before the onset of anycrisis in Japan’s developmental strategy andbefore neoliberal economic policies wereadopted. Post-war social homogeneity was builton Japan’s high level of income equality,something that is neither traditional noracknowledged in the Nihonjinron literature.Like other cultural nationalists in the 1970sJapanese Nihonjinron advocates did strip awaysome of the justifications for developmental

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nationalist policies, although the policiescontinued unchecked. For example, many ofthese authors argued that cu l tura lhomogeneity, rather than rises in real incomesamong the working class, explained minimallevels of strife between workers and managerswithin Japanese firms, ignoring the extremelyhigh levels of such strife until incomes reallyrose in the 1960s. In other words, in the 1970sand 1980s, when an important spur to culturalnationalism elsewhere in Asia was thecompensatory need to explain poverty and alsogrowing inequality, Japanese of those decadescould boast of economic success as the greatvalidating feature of national culture.

Postwar Japanese industrial developmentw a s b a s e d o n s t a b l e , w e l l - p a i dmanufacturing jobs

The 1990s: Economic Downturn and ItsConsequences

By the 1990s, however, the nationalistcelebration of Japanese difference hadattracted so many adherents that when the

economy plummeted in 1990, weighed down bybad loans and overvalued real-estate and stockmarkets, it took many Japanese by surprise,and instantly revived fears both of congenitaldeformity and of international isolation.Cultural analyses could no longer rest on theautomatic validation that economic success hadprovided. Moreover, the recession deeplyaffected people’s lives. The unemployment rate,which had been very low since the 1960s, shotup, and for the first time in decades manyJapanese felt anxious about their personalcircumstances as well as about the nation. Thisnew state of affairs eventually polarized publicopinion as Japanese debated whether toembrace cultural transformation or limit it, howto approach the international world, andwhether to shore up the now-falteringdevelopmental state or to adopt neo-liberalreforms.

For a time domestic Japanese debate seemed tobe leading toward a critical re-evaluation of theeconomy, national culture, and the relationshipbetween them. Miyazaki Yoshikazu’s 1992book, Compound Recession [Fukugo fukyo], setout to refute both Nihonjinron and otheranalyses that focused on the domestic economyin isolation from the global one. His call for areturn to developmental nationalist principlesat home and recognition of the many complexways in which Japanese economic institutionswere fully integrated into the global economysold over three million copies in the first year.Miyazaki, an eminent economist until his deathin 1998, argued that recent higher levels ofinternational integration of the majordeveloped economies, together with financialderegulation, had led to asset bubbles in theUnited States, Europe, and Japan, which allburst in the 1980s and early 1990s. Using theanalogy of ‘combined pollution,’ which createsa far greater problem than the sum of thevarious pollutants alone, Miyazaki argued thatthese global developments caused a ‘compoundrecession’ unlike any seen before. He alsostressed the fact that Japan had fully

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participated in creating that environmentrather than being its passive victim.[13]

Like Paul Krugman, whose ideas are also well-known in Japan, Miyazaki held that the glut ofbad loans in Japan depressed demand globallyand thwarted investment in Japan andelsewhere. Moreover, he argued, not only didthe various sectors of national economies nowoperate in relation to each other differentlythan they had in the past, but also globalproduction had ‘uncoupled’ the nationality offirms from employment. Along with thegrowing importance of capital movements,these were permanent unwelcome changes notjust in Japan but also in Europe and the UnitedStates. Returning to one of the centralpremises of developmental nationalists,Miyazaki believed that governments have anobligation to balance market efficiency with thesocial welfare needs of their citizens. Indeed,he argued that, like pollution, this ‘economicexternality’ could not be addressed by marketmeans alone, which is why the growingindependence of large firms from nationalgovernments is a problem.

Meanwhile, at first it seemed as thoughcultural nationalism was on the wane in areasother than the economy. Stellar economicperformance had become so closely associatedwith Japanese cultural uniqueness that theeconomic setback also reopened debate aboutJapan’s national identity. The early 1990s sawmajor efforts among both government officialsand the general population to reshape Japan’srelations with the world, especially Asia, in afar more respectful and equal way. Japan’sbookstores and airwaves overflowed withdiscussion about Japan’s wartime and imperialpast, and the first Socialist Prime Ministersince 1947, Murayama Tomiichi, issued astatement in 1995 apologizing for Japan’sconduct in World War II.[14] All the majorlanguage schools were deluged with studentslearning Asian languages, and the governmentseriously considered liberalizing immigration

rules. Domestically, resident Koreans gainednew rights and public opinion shifted markedlytoward embracing the desirability of adistinctive Okinawan-Japanese identity and theobligation of firms to control sexual harassmentof their female employees. Young people beganexploring new directions, some striking out ontheir own when the standard “lifetime-employment” path suddenly appeareduncertain at best. In other words, the early1990s were economically stagnant, but alsorepresented an unusually open and dynamicmoment culturally. The Japanese seemed to bemoving toward a more cosmopolitan andheterodox notion of national identity.

However, other Japanese drew a differentlesson from the economic crisis. They saw thepost-war institutions of economic success thathad been celebrated as uniquely functionalexpressions of traditional culture in the 1970sand 1980s as the source of Japan’s problemsbecause they hindered neo-liberal economicreforms. Economist Noguchi Yukio was themost energetic voice calling for neo-liberalreform in the 1990s. Revising his earlier viewsthat Japan had a normal capitalist economy,Noguch i a rgued tha t the J apanese‘developmental state’ was an obstacle tohealthy economic development. He reserved hisharshest criticism for the government, callingfor greater freedom for the market. Noguchiheld that Japan was locked in ‘the 1940 system’and that it desperately needed to break free ofits wartime institutional constraints bydismantling a variety of public regulatorysystems. These included subsidies to banks,industry, and agriculture, government barriersto competition among firms and betweeneconomic sectors, and such practices aslifetime employment and seniority wages. Someof these systems were established during thewar and some in the Occupation years, whichNoguchi treated as a single ‘1940s’ unit. Whilehighly respected among his peers as a scholar,Noguchi is also a gifted populariser and hisessays and books are widely read by the

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general public, including at least one nationalbusiness-list best-seller.

By the mid 1990s, government and businessleaders finally adopted neo-liberal policies on amassive scale, ending Japan’s exceptionallylong commitment to developmentalist economicinstitutions. When they stepped away frompractices such as lifetime employment andseniority-based wages, Japanese leaders did soon the grounds that they were too traditional,even though they were in fact modern—indeed,largely post-war – innovations. Since thesewere the very mechanisms that had equalisedincomes in the early post-war decades, by 1997the reforms had definitively reversed the longpost-war trend toward income equality for thefirst time since 1945.[15]

In the mid-1990s, just as social inequalitymounted, a relatively small number ofinfluential f igures built a classicallycompensatory cultural nationalist movement,asserting the right to national pride, includingan offensive military force, and blamingforeigners for all of Japan’s troubles. IshiharaShintaro, the novelist-turned-politician,epitomised this trend in his 1998 book, TheJapanese Economy That Can Say NO! whichcatapulted to top-ten business-list status. Nolonger using economic strength as the markerof cultural superiority, Ishihara insteadcelebrated the belligerency of the wartimestate. His call for greater reliance on themarket economy is also similar to that ofNoguchi Yukio, although Noguchi saw suchmeasures as the path to normalcy and Ishiharabelieved they would liberate Japaneseexceptionalism. [16]

Ishihara Shintaro in 1956 with fellownovelist Mishima Yukio (foreground)

Ishihara’s personal theme since his debut as aprize-winning novelist in the 1950s has been acelebration of self-confidence and defiantassertion of power. Since entering politics, firstas a member of the Diet and then as governorof Tokyo since 1999, he has nationalised thistheme. According to Ishihara, Japan’s economicproblems in the 1990s were caused byAmerican manipulation of the internationalfinancial system specifically in order tosubordinate Japan. The echoes with pre-warrightwing analysis are disturbingly loud, as isthe underlying anxiety about national decline.(His views also mirror 1980s American rhetoricabout Japanese economic warfare in that heechoes the argument that Japanese economicsuccess was based on unfair state intervention,making it clear that this is his primary target.)Ishihara is well-known for his insistence thatthe Nanjing Massacre never took place, hisapproving use of the war-time conception ofJapan as the leader of a ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’ and his deliberately

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insulting comments as governor that ‘third-country nationals,’ meaning resident Koreansand Chinese, pose a danger to other Tokyoites.(This Occupation-era term refers to formercolonial subjects who were stripped ofcitizenship, leaving many stateless.) Yet afterthe Japanese economy turned sour, he has alsostaked out the position that Japan mustcooperate with other Asian countries againstthe imperialist, arrogant Western powers. Likeother Japanese cultural nationalists who adoptthis position, he assumes that Japan will be theleader of Asia rather than a partner in moreequitable arrangements. [17]

Ishihara glories in deliberately provocativelanguage, often choosing images that combinehis longstanding interest in masculine sexualdomination with his newer concern for Japan’sinternational standing. He opened his 1998book with the argument that ‘the Japaneseeconomy is America’s concubine with boundfeet’. This image of poor Japan tottering onmangled ‘lotus feet’ is a bizarre twist: it claimscultural continuity for a practice that was neveradopted in Japan nor in most other Asiannations, indirectly associates foot-binding withWestern imperialism, and highlights hiscontemptuous-yet-fascinated stance towardChina. The image does work to emphasise hiscentral themes: that Japan has handicappeditself by failing to aggressively demand power,and, as a result, is now suffering fromfeminized, Orientalized, and old-fashioneddependence on others for even the most basicneeds. For those familiar with Ishihara’s work,it is unnecessary to add that in his casefeminised means emasculated.[18]

Prime Minister Koizumi and his successor AbeShinzo essentially followed Ishihara’s lead onboth cultural and economic matters, and since2001 the trend toward both neo-liberalism andcompensatory cultural nationalism has becomefar more pronounced. Rather than focusing, asthey had in the 1970s and 1980s, on domesticcultural arrangements that supposedly

benefited all Japanese materially andemotionally, such as consensus-decisionmaking or lifetime employment, culturalnationalists in the government punished schoolteachers who failed to sing the new nationalanthem and municipal governments that didnot display the new national flag, bothestablished as official practices in 1999.Koizumi championed neo-liberal economicreforms, particularly the privatization of thevast banking service that had operated throughthe postal system. As Gregory Noble, a politicalscientist at the University of Tokyo, noted:

One of the most striking aspects ofpolicy debates in Japan today is thecomplete absence of an articulateand coherent alternative to neo-liberalism, even though surveys ofboth the public and Diet membersreveal a deep-seated preferencefor a significant or even extensivegovernmental role in upholdingsocial stability….The neo-liberalm o v e m e n t e n e r g e t i c a l l yspearheaded by Prime MinisterKo i zumi has succeeded inpresenting itself as the onlysolution to the stagnation andcorruption of vested interests, eventhough it is itself a minorityopinion supported by a relativelynarrow range of interests from theinternationally exposed sectors ofthe economy.[19]

Koizumi combined this economic program withan insistence on making official visits toYasukuni shrine, even though his actionsdamaged Japan’s diplomatic relations withChina. His successor in 2006, Abe Shinzo,while declining to publicly visit Yasukuni, waseven more hawkish on i ssues o f warremembrance and essentially rescinded Japan’sacknowledgment both at the Tokyo War Crimes

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Trials and by Prime Minister Murayama thatthe wartime government had enslaved anestimated 80,000-200,000 foreign women toprovide sex to the military.[20]

The strident nationalism of contemporaryJapanese leaders not only reeks of bullying andsullen resentment directed at foreigners,domestic minorities, and women, it also seemsto bear no useful relationship to Japanesenational economic or strategic interests.I ronica l ly , cu l tura l nat ional isms incontemporary India and China, with their red-hot economies, may soon look as sunnilyboastful as did Japanese cultural nationalism inthe 1970s and especially the 1980s – withoutJapan’s lingering commitment to developmentalnationalism or its pacifism – while the Japanesetrajectory seems to be toward the kind ofcultural justification of economic inequalitythat characterized India in the same decades.In this sense, Japan at the dawn of the twenty-first century is more like the United States,where nationalist rhetoric also sounds far lessself-confident and more sullenly resentful thanin the early post-war decades, and is similarlyaccompanied by foreign policies that alienatepeople elsewhere without advancing Americannational interests.[21]

Laura Hein is a professor in the Department ofHistory, Northwestern University and a JapanFocus coordinator. Her most recent book isReasonable Men, Powerful Words: PoliticalCulture and Expertise in 20th Century Japan.The Japanese edition was brought out byIwanami Press in 2007.

This article was prepared for Japan Focus andposted on June 26, 2008.

NOTES:

1. One can of course imagine scenarios inwhich such arguments perform exactly thesame ‘cultural work’ as have arguments for

Japanese uniqueness.

2 S. Vlastos, Mirror of modernity: inventedtraditions of modern Japan, Berkeley:University of California Press, 1998. T. Fujitani,Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry inModern Japan, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996. C. Gluck, Japan’sModern Myths, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1985. H. D. Harootunian, Overcome byModernity: History, Culture, and Community inInterwar Japan. Princeton University Press:2000. E. Oguma, A Genealogy of ‘Japanese’self-images. Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press,2002, Japanese ed. 1995. D. Stegewerns,Nationalism and Internationalism in ImperialJapan: Autonomy, Asian Brotherhood, or WorldCitizenship?, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004.

3 T. Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis andNeo-nationalism, London: NLB, 1977 an P. vander Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion andModernity in India and Britain, Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2001, show how thetwo developed together in Britain.

4. Loss of cultural authenticity per se hasalways accompanied modernity as the market,urbanization, and rationalization erode oldercultural patterns. The difference is thatAmericans, Germans, and other Westernerswere less likely to see these problems asimported wholesale from elsewhere. See R.Desai, ‘Nation against Democracy: The Rise ofCultural Nationalism in Asia,’ in F. Quadir andJ. Lele, eds., Democracy and Civil Society inAsia, vol. 1 Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2004, pp. 81-110. T. Najita and H. D.Harootunian, ‘Japanese Revolt against theWest: Political and Cultural Criticism in theTwentieth Century’. The Twentieth Century, vol6. P. Duus, Ed. The Cambridge History of JapanCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

5. D. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe:Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference.Princeton University Press, 2000. p. 6. T.

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Winichakul has developed the point aboutattention to imperialism even in non-colonizedareas in, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation, Honolulu: University ofHawai’i Press, 1994.

6. Harootunian and Najita, ‘Japanese Revoltagainst the West’.

7. L. Young, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuriaand the Culture of Wartime Imperialism.Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998,Japanese edition, 2001. Y. Yamanouchi, J. V.Koschmann, and R. Narita, eds., Total War and‘Modernization’. Ithaca, NY: Cornell East AsiaSeries, 1998.

8. See The Special Survey Committee, Ministryof Foreign Affairs. Ed. Reconstruction of theJapanese Economy. Tokyo: University of TokyoPress, 1992. Also see Hein, Reasonable Men,Chapter 4.

9. P J Katzenstein, Tamed Power: Germany inEurope, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press,1997.

10. For representative examples, see Sekai,which published 102 articles by Tsuru, 19 byUzawa, and 41 by Miyamoto between 1946 and1995. Sekai Somokuji: 1946-1995, Tokyo:Iwanami, 1995.

11. H. Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity, p. 14dates the explosion of Nihonjinron literature tothe 1960s but the cumulative effect of thisargument really gained far greater momentumin the following decade. See Chapter 5 forargument about national flag. T. Fujitani,‘Inventing, forgetting, remembering: toward ahistorical ethnography of the nation-state’, inBefu, ed. Cultural Nationalism in East Asiaemphasises the disappearance of the empire.

12. Befu, Hegemony of Homogeneity and H.Befu, ed. Cultural Nationalism in East Asia:Representation and Identity, Research papers

and policy studies; 39; Berkeley, CA: Instituteof East Asian Studies, University of California,1993

13. Y. Miyazaki, Fukugo Fukyo: posuto baburuno shohosen o motomete (Compound recession:toward a prescription for the post-bubbleeconomy). Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha, 1992 (22cdprinting by 1998). Also see K. Miyamoto, NihonShakai no Kannosei: Iji Kanno na Shakai e, (ThePossibility of Japanese society: toward a self-sustaining society), Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten,2000.

14. The official translation is available here.

15. C Moriguchi and E Saez, ‘The Evolution ofIncome Concentration in Japan, 1886-2005:Evidence from Income Tax Statistics,’ Reviewof Economics and Statistics, Forthcoming.

16. S. Ishihara and Hitotsubashi SogoKenkyujo. ‘No’ to ieru nihon keizai; sensenfukoku: America no kinyu dorei kara no kaiho.(The Japanese economy that can say ‘no’;liberation from American financial slavery’.)Tokyo: Kobunsha, 1998. For a discussion ofIshihara’s economic policy, see A. DeWit andM. Kaneko, ‘Ishihara and the Politics of hisBank Tax,’ JPRI Critique, IX.4 May 2002.

17. S. Ishihara, ‘Tawara Soichiro no kakutotaiwa: ima koso jitsugen dekiru ‘Dai ToaKyoeiken (No-holds-barred debate with TawaraSoichiro: Now is the time to realise the‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,’Sansara. July 1991: 44-59. J. Nathan, JapanUnbound: A Volatile Nation’s Quest for Prideand Purpose. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004,pp. 191-2. S. Ishihara and M. Mahathir, ’No’ toieru Ajia: Tai-obei e no hosaku. Tokyo:Kobunsha 1994 was also a best seller.

18. Nathan, Japan Unbound, Chapter 7.

19. G. W. Noble, ‘Koizumi and Neo-liberalEconomic Reform,’ Social Science Japan,

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March 2006, pp. 6-9, esp. p. 9.

20. When the Japanese government acceptedthe judgment o f the Tokyo Tr ia ls , i tacknowledged the enslavement of Dutchwomen in the Netherlands East Indies but notthe Asian women who suffered the same fate.

21. T. Franks, What’s the Matter with Kansas?How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,NY: Metropolitan Books, 2004 makes theargument for the domestic basis of this stance,one tha t sounds very much l i ke thecompensatory cultural nationalism discussed inthis collection.