It is not difficult to find continuities in the Japanese countryside. Small-scale family farming on holdings averaging less than three acres prevails today as in 1900. Despite almost a century of modern economic growth, the number of farm families has remained fairly constant, declining only slightly from five and one-half million at the turn of the century to five million in the late 1970s. There has been continuity not only in the number of farm families but also in the families themselves: The overwhelming majority of Japanese farmers today are the descendants of farmers in the Meiji era (1868–1912). As in the past they reside in small hamlets, clusters of an average of fifty to sixty farmhouses surrounded by rice paddies and upland fields. Rice remains their principal field crop, accounting for 59 percent by value of total field crop production in 1900 and 53 percent in 1970.

Yet contrasts with the past abound, and collectively they make the countryside vastly different from what it was eighty years ago. Japanese agriculture is no longer the highly labor-intensive undertaking it used to be. At the turn of the century it took roughly one hundred days of labor to grow an acre of rice. Today, owing primarily to the diffusion of capital-intensive farming methods, thirty to thirty-five days will suffice, and output per acre is almost 70 percent higher than before. The dependence of farm families on agricultural income has also declined markedly.

CIRCUMSTANCES AND MOTIVATIONS

Japan's rise as a colonial power stands as an anomaly in the history of modern imperialism, one that can be understood only in the context of Japan's historical and geographic circumstances and the world events in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Launched in the high noon of the “new imperialism,” the Japanese colonial empire was to a large extent formally patterned after the tropical empires of modern Europe. Yet, as the only non-Western imperium of modern times, Japan's overseas empire stood apart from its European counterparts, its circumstances scarcely duplicated elsewhere.

The first and most arresting aspect of the Japanese empire is the fact that the metropolitan homeland itself only narrowly escaped colonial subjugation, surviving as one of the four Asian nations (along with China, Siam, and Korea) to escape obliteration in the flood of Western dominance in the nineteenth century. As it was, Japan's emergence as a colonial power in the late 1890s came just as the nation was extricating itself from the unequal treaty system imposed three decades earlier by the Western powers. The reasons for this remarkable phenomenon– the pull of other Asian opportunities on aggressive Western energies at mid-century and the revolutionary transformation of Japan from a weak, feudal, and agrarian country into a modern industrial power economically and militarily capable of resisting foreign domination– have been so extensively explored in this and other histories that they need no repetition here. What does require reemphasis is that both historical timing and an overriding concern for national security were basic to the initial direction of Japanese expansion.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout much of Japan's modern history, the West has contributed to its formulation of theories of culture and action. At one level the image of a monolithic West replaced an earlier interpretation of China as the “other.” In the twentieth century and especially after World War I, Japan's conceptualization of the West affirmed a theory of militant and articulate revolt against the “other,” usually imagined as a collective threat to Japan's national independence and cultural autonomy. The construction of the “other” required that it be portrayed as the mirror image of the indigenous culture. It was this representation of the “other” that clarified for the Japanese the essence of their own culture. This reversing of images was no less true in the Tokugawa period, when an idealized China had constituted the “other,” than in the twentieth century, when a monolithic West did. If the “other” defined what was exceptional in Japanese culture, it also offered a model of excellence against which such distinctiveness could be measured. Just as Tokugawa writers focused on the world of the ancient sages, changing it into an unhistorical abstraction whose values existed only in pure form in Japan, so twentieth-century thinkers imagined a Japan destined to reach new levels of achievements realized by no single Western nation. Through this doubling of images, they shaped a theory of action aimed at maintaining a pure, indigenous cultural synthesis protected from outside elements that might disturb the perceived equilibrium.

ECONOMIC GROWTH, 1885–1920

The stabilization of the economy following the Matsukata deflation of the early 1880s marks the end of a transitional period in Japan's economic development and the beginning of the initial phase of modern economic growth that continued to the end of World War I. By the mid-1880s the costs of the Restoration and its aftermath had largely been met, and a start had been made on building an economic infrastructure. Although economic activity and life-styles were still scarcely touched by modern technology and organization, the seeds of a modern economic sector in industry, trade, and finance, on which Japan's future was to depend, were being sown.

It is from the 1880s that a reasonably reliable and comprehensive set of quantitative estimates (the LTES series) is available. Prepared in the 1960s and subsequently adjusted in some details, these estimates have provided the material for some sophisticated analyses of Japan's experience. The importance of quantitative data for the description and understanding of economic growth scarcely needs emphasizing. There are, however, caveats regarding these estimates. Although based on the consideration and evaluation of all available data, these estimates have been made into a consistent system by reference to an overall model that makes assumptions about the relationships of the various individual series to one another. Gaps in the data for the period before the late 1880s, moreover, can be filled only on the basis of some preconceptions about the speed and direction of growth.

INTRODUCTION

The Japanese economy experienced great changes as a result of World War I. With the disappearance of European and American products from Asian and African trade, these extensive markets suddenly became wide open to Japanese products. Export volume and prices shot up, and Japan's industries reveled in an unprecedented boom. A spate of new firms appeared in rapid succession; stock prices soared; and the whole country rang with the sound of hammers at work on new-factory construction. Products like steel, machinery, and chemicals, for which Japan had been dependent on imports, began to be produced domestically. From its status as a debtor nation to the tune of ¥1.1 billion on the eve of the war in 1913, Japan had, by the end of 1920, transformed itself into a creditor nation with a surplus exceeding ¥2 billion. Despite social unrest such as the 1918 rice riots and the intensification of the labor and peasant movements that accompanied the galloping inflation produced by the war boom, the Japanese economy expanded as a result of the war.

When the war ended, however, so did the boom. Because of the renewed export competition and the resumption of imports that had long been suspended while Europe was at war, the international payments balance reverted to a deficit, and holdings of gold and foreign exchange began to diminish. This chapter will trace the path of the Japanese economy from the 1920s to the end of the Pacific War.

Politics in modern society is both a cause and an effect of socioeconomic change. Sometimes it is possible to discern and trace the causal link between the two; that is, a specific political action is seen to cause a specific socioeconomic change, and vice versa. More often, however, the direction of the link is fuzzy and difficult to determine. A political action is seen to result from a set of socioeconomic conditions and in turn to bring about a new set of socioeconomic conditions. The relationship between politics and socioeconomic change in postwar Japan is no exception.

During the twenty-eight years between the summer of 1945 and the summer of 1973, the Japanese society and economy underwent an obvious and far-reaching transformation. On the other hand, politics appear to have changed little, in fact so little that a casual observer might have missed it completely. Upon closer examination, however, it becomes evident that politics, too, underwent a significant change during the period, in a close and complex relationship with the change in the society's socioeconomic conditions. The unstable multiparty pattern that prevailed during the first postwar decade yielded to a short-lived quasi-two-party system in the second half of the 1950s and then to a stable one-party-dominated multiparty regime in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is thus possible, in terms of both socioeconomic changes and shifts in the balance and alignment among the political parties, to divide these twenty-eight years into two distinctive periods.

In the 1890s many observers at home and abroad discovered that Japan had finally entered the mainstream of world history and had indeed become a principal actor in that history. As Ōkuma Shigenobu remarked at the end of the Sino-Japanese War, “Japan is no longer a Japan for Japan, but a Japan for the world.” Although some Japanese viewed the end of their cultural and political isolation as cause for unrestrained self-congratulation, others were ambivalent about its implication for the future. If Japan became more like other modern nations, its material and political development might continue, but only at the expense of social harmony or cultural integrity. As the country moved into a new century, there was uncertainty over the shape of Japan's future.

One vision of the future saw Japan as eternally unique, able to maintain its traditional culture and values even in the midst of rapid economic and political change. This point of view, which we might call the particularist or exceptionalist perspective, found champions in the Seikyōsha writers of the early 1890s, who urged that the nation's cultural essence (kokusui) be preserved in the march toward modernity. Given the polychromatic character of Japan's cultural past, however, it was difficult to identify this cultural essence. Unlike China, which boasted of an easily identifiable great tradition, Japan had none. Where, then, were the Seikyōsha writers to find the kokusui–in the myths and legends of the Shinto tradition, in the sensibilities of Heian culture, in the harsh ethos of the warrior class, in the boisterous arts of the Tokugawa townsmen, or in the austere puritanism of Tokugawa Confucianism?

Writers of contemporary history face a curious paradox. Because they have lived through the period they describe, they should have an easy time writing about it. But in fact, the contemporary historians' task is far more intractable than is that of the medievalists who have no direct experience of the world they study. The medievalists' task is made easy by the fact that moth and rust have destroyed much of the evidence for their period. By contrast, evidence at the contemporary historians' disposal is, for all practical purposes, limitless. For every volume of Kamakura ibun, for example, there are shelf miles of official papers, private papers, books, periodicals, photographs, and films documenting even a single year of the twentieth century. This embarrassment of riches provides contemporary historians with an amount of material that the medievalists cannot hope for even in their wildest dreams, yet this abundance limits what contemporary historians can confidently understand in a lifetime. Contemporary historians can explore a narrow problem definitively in a way that medievalists cannot, but they have more difficulty grasping the larger context of that problem.

In a sense, contemporary historians know too much but understand too little. Although the medievalists may never really be sure how Minamoto Yoritomo died, they can have few doubts about Yoritomo's place in history. On the other hand, even though the health and political problems of a contemporary politician like Tanaka Kakuei are chronicled in the daily press, the contemporary historians cannot be entirely confident about their assessment of Tanaka, if only because he is still alive and his biography not yet complete.

GREATER JAPAN OR LESSER JAPAN?

The world's attention turned toward Japan after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War. This small island nation in East Asia not only had escaped falling under the colonial control of the Western imperialist powers, but it also had emerged as an imperialistic nation in its own right, on its way toward hegemony in East Asia and the western Pacific. The advanced countries that opposed or supported Japan in the war against Russia, and other Asian countries that were the targets of Western expansion, contemplated Japan's future with a mixture of admiration and wariness.

In retrospect, it can be said that the Russo-Japanese War brought Japan to an important crossroads in the path of its national destiny. The basic issue was whether Japan should be satisfied with a limited success as a solid middle-sized nation or should drive toward becoming a great military power dominating the Asian continent. In the postwar years, journalists and intellectuals debated Japan's goals and direction during its next stage of development. The debate considered several issues: greater “Japanism” versus little “Japanism,” northern advance versus southern advance, and army-first versus navy-first. Greater Japanism implied continued expansionism, whereas little Japanism implied satisfaction with the postbellum status quo. Northern advance and southern advance were somewhat more ambiguous terms. The first was generally understood to mean a policy of continental expansion from the Korean peninsula through Manchuria into China proper; the second was understood to mean expansion from Taiwan into south China and Southeast Asia.