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Japan's Democratization: Miyatake Gaikotsu on Prewar Plans and Postwar Programmes
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 November 2010
Abstract
Japan's early postwar leadership and American occupiers alike asserted that democratization was a new lesson that the Japanese public would have to learn. In fact, the ideas of democratic reformers had been broadcast to a large audience as feasible programmes decades before 1945. Miyatake Gaikotsu, the editor of Democracy in 1919, outlined the benefits that democratic reforms might provide in a post-World War I world. Decades later, Japanese people faced a new postwar struggle, not as victors but as the vanquished. Gaikotsu, writing in 1945, reflected on democracy in these new circumstances in his study, Amerika-sama. Although the situation was vastly different, victory and defeat in world wars had opened paths to new possibilities. This paper examines Gaikotsu's prewar writings as prescient prescriptions that he revisits in his essay Amerika-sama, or ‘Honourable America,’ at the point they begin to be played out, in some instances only partially and at times for ill as well as good, in occupied Japan. These reflections strikingly demonstrate the continuity of ideas during the prewar past and postwar present. Amerika-sama is a representative expression of many programmes Gaikotsu and likeminded humanistic activists attempted to put into practice from the late nineteenth century until they were suppressed during the wartime years. Mainstream political parties, prewar and postwar, often found it difficult to embrace Gaikotsu's ideas and political programmes. Nevertheless, the general public embraced them and they now find legal support in the Constitution of Japan.
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References
1 Dower, J. (1999). Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, W. W. Norton, New York, p. 65Google Scholar.
2 Miyatake Gaikotsu was born ‘Miyatake Kameshirō’, a given name that includes the character for ‘turtle’, in 1867. He disliked his given name and, at age 17, legally changed it to ‘Gaikotsu’, which means ‘skeleton’. He is usually referred to in writings about his life as ‘Gaikotsu’ and that convention is followed in this paper.
3 The Japanese suffix –sama in Amerika-sama is an honorific form of ‘Mister’ and its variants used by social inferiors to people of superior standing. Perhaps the most common use is by those employed in a business to refer to their customers, as in ‘Okyaku-sama’, which might literally translate as ‘Honoured guest’. The expression is used by elevator operators, in public address systems on trains and in airports, and by restaurant staff. It at once conveys considerable social distance, courtesy, and subservience. At times it is more politesse than genuinely polite in connoting functionality and the impermanence of the ‘guest’. Here the sardonic meaning is translatable as ‘The Honourable America’.
4 The breadth of Gaikotsu's interests can be appreciated by his foray into sexology. See Algoso, T. A. (2006). Thoughts on Hermaphroditism: Miyatake Gaikotsu and the Convergence of the Sexes in Taishō Japan, Journal of Asian Studies, 65, 555–573CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Amerika-sama is Gaikotsu's last original publication, but other works by him, such as censored prewar writings, did appear after 1945.
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17 As for timing, his strongest critiques of state power came before the rise of the military dominated governments in the late 1920s and early 1930s. After the Kantō Earthquake and the destruction of so many popular publications, he devoted less time to activism and more time to creating the nation's first newspaper archive at Tokyo Imperial University (Teidai), as a way of preserving the nation's memory through saving perishable works of popular culture. From the 1930s through the war years, Gaikotsu (as was the case with many who were persecuted as enemies of the state for their long history of oppositional politics) tended to keep his head down. He was also past his sixtieth birthday when the Manchurian Incident broke out in 1931 and had already moved to activities that proved less demanding and personally safer than challenging the wartime government. He increasingly devoted his time to research and lecturing on Meiji culture and serving as fundraiser, collector, and archivist for the Teidai collection that he established. He was not without strong views about what was occurring around him, but he appeared to follow Voltaire's advice in Candide on the wisdom of tending to one's own garden. His diary for the years 1944 to 1946, for example, mainly takes up just three subjects: his postcard collection, obtaining food, and fishing. Influential friends, for example Yoshino Sakuzō; members of Teidai's Faculty of Law; Mainichi Shinbun company president Motoyama Hikoichi; Seiki Hironao, founder of the Hakuhōdō advertising agency; Hankyū railways and department store mogul, Kobayashi Ichizō; may have also helped reduce official harassment. See Miyatake Gaikotsu nenpu, in Miyatake, G., Miyatake Gaikotsu chosaku shū, vol. 8, pp. 733–868.
18 Osaka Humour News, 28 February 1910.
19 Yoshino, Miyatake Gaikotsu, p. 284.
20 Osaka Humour News, 15 February 1909.
21 Kimoto, Hyōden Miyatake Gaikotsu, pp. 286–294.
22 Kimoto, Hyōden Miyatake Gaikotsu, p. 256.
23 Lewis, M. (2009). A Life Adrift: Soeda Azembō, Popular Song, and Modern Mass Culture in Japan, Routledge, New York, pp. xxxviii–xxixGoogle Scholar.
24 Osaka Humour News, March 1904.
25 Yoshino, Miyatake Gaikotsu, pp. 129–130; see original in 27 March, 1904 Osaka Humour News. Gaikotsu attempted to use the same partial blocking out of text to skirt laws against publishing offensive or vulgar words. This was done by leaving out the specific offensive ideograph while making the overall message comprehensible through the use of ideographs on either side of the missing term.
26 Amerika-sama, p. 746. In the mid-1930s he continued to be opposed to war, but muted his criticism of Japan's military involvement overseas. In response to an invitation from a popular magazine to contribute a celebratory poem to welcome in the New Year of 1936 on the theme of Japan's outstanding progress as it ‘surged ahead’ he wrote: ‘After all, what is ‘surging ahead’? Staying put or encroaching abroad? If staying put, then I pity the people who were born in Japan, but just cannot bear to live their lives here. If encroaching, then there are major consequences in the sphere of human morality’. Quoted in Yoshino, Miyatake Gaikotsu, p. 294.
27 Kimoto, Hyōden Miyatake Gaikotsu, p. 370.
28 For a discussion of the urban riots and the political demands made by city residents in Tokyo, Osaka, and other major cities see Lewis, M. (1990). Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan, University of California Press, Berkeley, pp. 82–134Google Scholar.
29 Yoshino, Minken e no kodawari, pp. 125–130.
30 Gaikotsu and Atsuta Shōji were the official founders of the new party and the journal created to support it. Gaikotsu took the lead in writing and editing the journal as well as dealing with Japanese officialdom. He was better suited to these tasks than was Atsuta, a printing factory worker and labour organizer, who took a key role in linking the party's propaganda effort with recruiting Minpon-tō members. It is safe to assume that Gaikotsu authored most of the unsigned articles in Democracy. Kimoto, Hyōden Miyatake Gaikotsu, pp. 431–432.
31 Miyatake, G. (1995). Miyatake Gaikotsu kononaka ni ari, vol. 23, Minpon shugi, Kōtoku ippa Taigyaku jiken tenmatsu, Yumani Shobō, Tokyo 1995, p. 68Google Scholar. The original 1919 edition of Democracy (Minpon shugi) is photographically reproduced in its entirety in this collection of Gaikotsu's work on pages 1 through 74. The page numbers in this article refer to the page numbers in the reprinted edition which is hereafter abbreviated in the footnotes as Democracy.
32 Democracy, p. 2.
33 Ibid., p. 2.
34 Ibid. p. 45.
35 Ibid., p. 10.
36 Ibid., p. 10.
37 Ibid., p. 10.
38 Ibid., p. 10.
39 Ibid., p. 9.
40 Ibid., p. 9.
41 Miyatake Gaikotsu nenpu, p. 855.
42 Nishi, T. (1982). Unconditional Democracy: Education and Politics in Occupied Japan, 1945–1952, Hoover Institution Press, Stanford, California, p. 86Google Scholar.
43 Amerika-sama, pp. 733–734.
44 Ibid., p. 739.
45 Ibid., p. 749.
46 Ibid., p. 765.
47 Ibid.a, p. 765. On Shōriki see Takemae, E. (2003). The Allied Occupation of Japan, translated by Ricketts, Robert and Swann, Sebastian, Continuum International Publication Group, London, p. 313Google Scholar.
48 Amerika-sama, p. 766.
49 Ibid., p. 766.
50 Osaka Humour News, 15 February, 1909.
51 Gaikotsu's prickly relationship with Miyake was also evident in minor confrontations during the prewar years. In response to an invitation to contribute to the 5 April, 1920 special issue of Nihon ayobi Nihonjin on the theme of ‘Japan a Century from Now’, Gaikotsu titled his remarks ‘An Answer to a Stupid Question’, and observed that if he responded seriously that this magazine would not have the courage to publish his views. Yoshino, Miyatake Gaikotsu, p. 288.
52 Amerika-sama, p. 767.
53 Ibid., p. 767. The happiness was temporary because Tokutomi was eventually released from jail and house-arrest and never faced trial. He outlived Gaikotsu by a few years and died in 1958 in Atami.
54 Ibid., p. 767.
55 Ibid., p. 762. Postwar revelations showed that in 1945 Nosaka actually advocated that the imperial institution be retained but was overruled by the Soviets. Nosaka's reasons for his personal recommendation was his fear that eliminating the Japanese monarchy would be unpopular and would alienate the JCP from the Japanese public; see David E. Sanger, ‘Japanese Communist Disgraced at 100’, New York Times, 22 September, 1992.
56 Ibid., p. 761.
57 Ibid., p. 762.
58 Ibid., p. 760–761.
59 Ibid., p. 778–779.
60 Bix, H. (2002). Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan, Harper Collins, New York, p. 576Google Scholar.
61 Ibid., Hirohito, p. 576.
62 Amerika-sama, p. 761.
63 Ibid., p. 762.
64 A representative summary of Gaikotsu's virtues and deficiencies, as seen from the early postwar left in Japan, appears in Sumitani, S. (1954). Ōsaka kokkei shinbun ni tusite, Shinbun gaku hyōron, 2, March 1954, pp. 23–39.
65 Sumitani, ‘Ōsaka kokkei shinbun ni tsuite’, p. 39.
66 Gaikotsu reportedly erupted with rage when he saw that the American officials, who censored parts of Amerika-sama, could be just as bad as Japanese wartime leaders. NHK Television, Rekishi hiwa historia: Miyatake Gaikotsu, broadcast 1 July, 2009.
67 Amerika-sama, p. 778.
68 Ibid., p. 775. Gaikotsu's view of the discontinuity in language during the first years of the Occupation on several points contrasts with John Dower's ‘Bridges of Language’ chapter in Embracing Defeat. Whereas Gaikotsu observes a break between wartime and peacetime expressions, Dower notes that ‘. . . a certain elasticity in wartime rhetoric and values made it possible to pursue such bright new hopes without feeling thoroughly disoriented. Language—vague, emotional, evocative discourse of the most formulaic sort—proved to be a bridge on which people could move from the militaristic past toward a more peaceful future, while still retaining a sense of familiarity, consistency, even integrity of a sort’. On the larger point of prewar and postwar ‘liberal discourse’, Dower does explore the ‘resumption of an interrupted critical tradition’ in the postwar revival of leftist publications, including major journals such as Kaizō and Chūō Kōron. Dower, Embracing Defeat, pp. 174, 185–186.
69 Amerika-sama, pp. 775–776.
70 Ibid., p. 776.
71 Ibid., p. 733.
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