日本論1On Japan, Part 1

What is Japan? This question itself only truly swelled into a critical issue following the contact and friction with a new entity—the West—after the Meiji Restoration of 1868, marking the end of the Edo period that had persisted for some three hundred years. With the inception of the new era named Meiji, the nation entered a new current, tasked with constructing its own positioning within the vast axis of the world. Approximately one hundred and sixty years have passed since then. We have arrived at this point having lived through countless turning points of the era at a ferocious velocity. Yet, if asked whether we can now, after a mere century and a half, provide an appropriate answer to the question "What is Japan?", surely everyone would find themselves at a loss for words.

In general perception, there is a deep-seated tendency to view Japan as a nation rare even on a global scale, possessing a mono-ethnic population of one hundred million; the evaluation stands out that its original culture, nurtured in the soil of this island nation, has been sublimated by a unique spirit while accepting complex external influences. Indeed, such evaluations are still rampant, and one frequently encounters them. Certainly, I believe these contain a measure of fact, but at the same time, in the modern age, such frivolous ways of thinking serve well enough as mere pastimes, yet they fail to truly move the life force to gratitude or awe. Therefore, for me—an independent researcher who has spent the last eight years traversing the various regions of Japan, exploring without regard to disciplinary boundaries—answering this question has become of critical importance. Of course, the answer I present is, after all, only provisional. However, as I am soon to reach the age of thirty-five, I feel that facing this question with sincerity over the next fifteen years or so has become more important than ever before.

Thus, we have decided to establish a new serialized section within Shitsurae titled Communal Illusion, and here I shall release essays that approach the theme of "What is Japan?" through a unique lens. There is a decisive awareness of the problem in titling this Communal Illusion. While there have been voluminous inquiries into the question "What is Japan?" heretofore, the one who influenced me most intensely was the philosopher Tetsuji Yamamoto. And it was through Yamamoto that I came to confront Takaaki Yoshimoto, hailed as the greatest thinker of the post-war era. In fact, theories of Japan prior to Yoshimoto’s arrival were basically premised on the theory of the state as an ideology constructed before the war, and had not been able to break free from it. This state theory, in essence, positioned the Emperor at the apex and discussed Japan from the perspective of an image of the state characterized by an unbroken imperial line spanning over two thousand years and a single ethnicity. In my personal interpretation, the "unbroken imperial line" (bansei ikkei, 万世一系) is the unification of bloodlines. The "single ethnicity" (tan'itsu minzoku, 単一民族) is the unification of tribes. By unifying this bidirectional movement within the modern state of Japan, the state reclaimed the origin itself, establishing a structure wherein Japan was discussed within that reclamation.

In reality, the academic system imported from the West upon entering the Meiji era was extremely complex, engaging in a syncretism where systems from multiple countries were simultaneously adopted in Japan, rather than emphasizing a relationship with any specific nation. However, at least when founding scholarship in Japan at the time, it was almost without exception under the influence of this ideology. Rather, scholarship and scholars pandered to the ideology of this new era. That is to say, they entered into the architectural work of reinforcing the image of "Japan" as a tangible reality, which until then had only been spoken of ambiguously, by enlisting Western academic techniques.

What requires caution in this instance is that the majority of the results released in this era were thought out with the new modern ideology, with the Emperor at its apex, as a premise. In other words, because thinking was conducted on the premise of erecting a modern ideology crowned by the Emperor, inevitably, no scholar could deviate from this stipulation. Because they concentrated so heavily on the construction of this ideological structure, the function possessed by thinking itself was slighted; eventually, this caused a misalignment, where the new image of the state, with Japan centered on the Emperor, was produced as an ideology in a form different from the initial design. The struggle surrounding this misalignment unfolded particularly across the three domains of the Meiji, Taisho, and early Showa periods. Countless political bodies and activist groups arose one after another—numbering in the hundreds—so one cannot discuss it monistically. However, what we must grasp here is the fact that, at the time, the tangible reality of "Japan" did not possess that much intensity. Because the erroneous premise is held today that a solid state image of Japan has flowed continuously through history, I feel this viewpoint is often overlooked. At that time, Japan as a tangible reality had not yet been established.

However, once the 1930s began, the situation began to shift. The turning point was a change in the quality of military personnel. Conventional soldiers did not possess much political voice, but here, fanned by the waves of accumulated state ideology, a new existence called "political soldiers" appeared. In short, these were people who, while being soldiers, actively involved themselves in politics; in the process of the rising power of these political soldiers, the Army seized hegemony. Thus, the voice of the Army’s political soldiers came to surpass that of conventional bureaucrats and politicians, and eventually, a militaristic ideology positioning the Emperor himself as the supreme ruler was established. This was adopted as a technology of state governance. Passing through the tumultuous era of the Second World War in this manner, upon the defeat in 1945, most people had no composure to summarize and think about what "Japan" had been—a concept propagandized at the time. Since everything had burned down, they were fully occupied with starting everything from zero. Under conditions where survival was the highest priority, ideology held no meaning. As a result, the conclusion to the inquiry "What is Japan?", which had intensified from the pre-war to the wartime period, was postponed. Moreover, because a new ideology called democracy, transplanted from the chaotic intervention of the victor nations, intervened there, the answer to the problem was extended even further.

This era continued for a long time, but the atmosphere began to change with the heightening of the leftist movements that intensified in the 1960s. Having already escaped the situation where there were no material goods, and welcoming an era where a new generation lived in high spirits without the threat of war, the question "Come to think of it, what was the Japan of that time?" manifested in the generation born and raised in the shadow of the war. In this case, during the first Anpo Protests (security treaty struggles) of 1960, the people participating in this social movement were in a situation where this question arose relatively easily, as they had been born and raised in the era when the war was occurring, even if they did not have the experience of directly entering the military and fighting. On the other hand, by the late 1960s—the time of the second Anpo Protests—the pivot was a new generation born post-war, so they possessed no direct experience of war. However, in the psychology of the youth of this later period, there was one decisive malfunction. That was: "The older generation, including our parents, executed that war, yet not a single one of them has summarized (reckoned with) it." This question turned into irritation toward their elders; it presented a fierce doubt toward a state system that, while causing the death of multitudes of its own citizens and devastating the country through war, was building a new era without reflection.

At this time, the entity against which they took a particularly reactionary stance was the academic system. Those among the youth of the time who could go to university had a privileged aspect; the majority of their generation had no such opportunity. Therefore, they harbored feelings of inferiority rather than superiority regarding the situation where they were fortunate enough to advance to university while many friends of the same generation could not. This was because it was common for friends more excellent than oneself to be unable to go to university due to their parents' financial circumstances. The conviction that "I must study for their share as well, since I can go to university despite being inferior to those friends" was a relatively common sentiment among the urban youth of the time. Another important thing is that, because they were born and raised under the influence of the democracy of the victor nations, the attitude that "Japan must not cause war again" was quite strong. However, at the same time, this later fragmented into leftist movements, while on the other hand, the attitude of those believing "Japan should rebuild its armaments and rise again" also strengthened reactionarily.

Because they were studying with such seriousness, scholarship appeared meaningless to them unless it confronted real problems in a practical manner. Of course, not all students were like this, but a certain number held such an attitude. However, a problem existed here. The university professors they learned from at the time were, without exception, people who had experienced the war, and among them remained many scholars who had enlisted scholarship in the service of the wartime regime. Yet, they merely spoke the sophistry of scholarship; while soldiers and politicians were judged by international law, the scholars' own responsibility was hardly questioned, and many remained in their professorial positions at universities after the war. Against this, the students of the time began to press intensely: "Do you truly have the aptitude to teach us?" What was being questioned here was not social rights or such foolishness, but how that person themselves had summarized the war and lived through it. This point of contention is extremely important.

It is not often considered, but in truth, the ones who first self-domesticated into the post-war system were these scholars, such as university professors. The students of the time saw through this inconvenient fact, but because the scholars had self-domesticated into the system, they shielded themselves with democratic rights and the like, and would not answer the students' questions at all. The students were questioning the person themselves, but the scholars answered with the regulations, norms, and rights of the system. Enraged by this, the students began to explode, feeling that being taught by such professors would serve no purpose whatsoever. In fact, in the leftist movement rising at the time, it was rampant that professors teaching Marx by jumping on the bandwagon had not actually read Marx’s Capital. In short, they had looked through related books by Marxists, but had not read the works of Marx himself. Ambitious students rebelled against this. Because they hungered to build a new era, the students of the time read more books than the scholars, and they pondered how the knowledge gained from those books connected to real problems. However, a troublesome problem lurked here. That was their failure to see that the residue of Zhu Xi (Neo-Confucianism)—which places absolute value on knowledge-centrism and the overemphasis on knowledge, a topic I frequently handle in Shitsurae—was intervening in the system.

Scholars and politicians who had self-domesticated into the indescribable edifice of the system could not respond properly to the youth who were trying to face the reality of the time seriously. A fierce, unidentifiable anxiety that their assertions merely echoed within a sealed concrete room, reaching nowhere. Because the youth harbored pent-up feelings that could not objectify the true nature of this anxiety, they provisionally called it "power" or "authority," but in truth, the opponent they were facing was not something that could be dismissed as mere power. Yet, the leftist ideology the youth were enthusiastic about offered no solution either. Because they were being defeated one after another in the university struggles, they were nearly crushed by the sense of crisis that they, too, would be defeated like the losers of the leftist movement of 1960, and eventually end their lives by self-domesticating into the system like their elders. In this desperate spiritual crisis, at the end of 1968 when the final thread of the youth was about to snap, a single shocking work suddenly appeared. That was The Theory of Communal Illusion (共同幻想論) by Takaaki Yoshimoto.

Communal Illusion is not large in volume, but every single word recorded therein is filled with profound insight, and advanced thinking is unfolded like a cosmos through the intuition unique to a thinker. Furthermore, Takaaki Yoshimoto chose not to take the path of becoming a scholar such as a university professor, but was a symbolic existence of a "living human" who executed his own thought together with his discourse in solitude; he had become a charismatic figure in the world of Japanese thought at the time. The students of Tokyo, who were the main battlefield of the student movement, faced the powerlessness of the professors teaching them, and thus became engrossed in Yoshimoto’s Communal Illusion. In the anecdotes of the time, it is said that regardless of gender, everyone participating in the student movement walked around clutching this Communal Illusion. At that time, Marx’s Capital and Takaaki Yoshimoto’s Communal Illusion were regarded by the youth as the two books that must be read. However, possessing them did not mean they could read them. In fact, in the insight that discussed the world itself deeply despite its brevity, Communal Illusion remained ultimately unraveled as the turbulent 1960s came to an end. And at this time too, in the end, the students of this era chose the path of affirming their own defeat and self-domesticating into the system. Japan, having thus been able to hold a massive matrix of workers, plunged into the dramatic period of high economic growth of the 1970s. In this moment, the priority shifted to money being more important than ideals or beliefs, and this became the driving force of Japan’s confusion for over fifty years since.

Results are results, but it is necessary to think about the problem they questioned there, and further, why they became enthusiastic about Communal Illusion. To present my way of seeing, there was a decisive turning point in the late 1960s where "Japan" as something tangible was completed. I believe that because they lived in that decisive era, they were moved by the sensations of Communal Illusion that could not be put into words. In other words, the youth of the time did not read Yoshimoto’s words to understand them with their heads, but read them by uniting with the universe of the words themselves. Therefore, it is difficult to verbalize, and furthermore, theoretical formulation is extremely difficult. However, please keep in the corner of your mind that the attitude that I view Japan as a tangible reality as having been completed after late 1968 will be thorough throughout this series.

In historical views until then, Japan was positioned as having begun its founding under the rule of the Emperor with the enthronement of the first Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC. Therefore, until the pre-war period, it was common to measure eras starting from February 11, 660 BC, the date of Emperor Jimmu's enthronement, such as "Imperial Year X." From such a viewpoint, the Emperor ideology flourished, but the important thing is that there are many problems that must be discerned regarding this Emperor ideology. To put it simply, "Emperor Ideology" and "the existence of the Emperor himself" are completely different things. Various distortions occur when these are equated, but these are dimensions of problem-setting that must originally be considered as completely separate. For example, even in the case where the responsibility of Emperor Showa is questioned regarding war responsibility in the Second World War, one must firmly separate and think about this Emperor ideology and the existence of the Emperor himself; if one confuses these, logic is constructed such that the Emperor also bears that ideological responsibility, and the locus of responsibility becomes ambiguous.

That is to say, it is a matter of seeing through to what is functioning within this elusive world called Japan. And I believe that pre-war Japan, or Japan during the Second World War, or even Japan in the early post-war period, did not possess the intensity of the image of the state called "Japan" in the sense spoken of today. Rather, in my eyes, Japan was established for the first time when the students were defeated in the student movement of 1968. What must not be mistaken is that Japan was not established because they lost to the state power they were asserting against. This point of argument is very important. Why do I personally view Japan as having been established at this moment? It is because the youth, who possessed a movement of anti-establishment and confronted reality with a strong will to create the state themselves, switched immediately to self-domestication into the system as soon as they were defeated in the student movement. What I want to say is not what happened historically there, but that "their attitude itself" became the root of the establishment of Japan. In short, documents and constitutions do not become the basis for the establishment of Japan.

In fact, if the turning point of Japan’s establishment is set at 1968, Japan in the sense we currently think of applies thereafter, but before that, it should become blurred. To treat the place where the focus is sharp and the place where it is blurred as identical is a pre-war ideology; we must separate them firmly here. However, what is very difficult is that the form of illusion invisible to our eyes is constantly writhing and continuing to metamorphose here. It was Takaaki Yoshimoto who pointed this out. Takaaki Yoshimoto’s Communal Illusion is composed of three layers—individual illusion, pair illusion, and communal illusion—as the mode of this illusion, but the essential point is that these are not separated. And what is important is that the root from which Yoshimoto established the viewpoints of individual illusion, pair illusion, and communal illusion was the existence of a single book. That is the Kojiki.

The Kojiki, which compiled myths, folklore, legends, and historical facts and was established in 712 AD, is positioned as the oldest existing book in Japan. However, on the other hand, even though it is the Kojiki, it is strictly a book from the first half of the 8th century; thus, when viewed from civilized nations like neighboring China, which possessed a character culture and further a literature culture of books from around several thousand years BC, this large time lag becomes a problem. For instance, on the Chinese side, the voluminous history book Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) was established as early as the 1st century BC; even thinking from that starting point, it means that for at least some 800 years, the compilation of history books was not conducted as a state project on the Japanese side. Therefore, a blank period expands enormously, but when thinking from the Paleolithic era which is the initial history of Japan, it becomes a time axis spanning tens of thousands of years. Furthermore, this "documentary void" period is in a state where the actual conditions on the Japanese side—during times when upheavals were occurring on the neighboring Chinese side—are completely unknown documentarily; thus, how to capture these several centuries, several millennia, and several tens of thousands of years becomes the problem for answering "What is Japan?". After all, the existence of refugees who fled to Japan triggered by complex upheavals on the continent, ranging from climate change to wars on the continent, cannot be severed from Japanese history, and it is conceivable that a considerable layer entered publicly as immigrants. However, because these occurred without exception during the documentary void, the reality is extremely difficult to grasp.

In a sense, precisely because this part is ambiguous and lacks solid grounds, the ideology of Japan premised on the enthronement of Emperor Jimmu in 660 BC could be established in pre-war ideology. But the major premise everyone must realize is that this is calculated in the Western calendar. To begin with, Japan only started using the Western calendar after entering the 5th year of Meiji, 1872; the Western calendar was not used in eras prior to that. Therefore, it is strange in itself to set 660 BC as the year of Emperor Jimmu’s enthronement using this Western calendar as a ruler. And regarding this 660 BC problem, the one who made an extremely important statement was Tadao Iijima, a scholar of East Asian history before the war. Personally, I think he was the most excellent East Asian historian, but Iijima’s existence is completely forgotten today. However, he was active using calculations such as the calendar methods of Chinese astronomy from around the 1930s when the Emperor ideology was being nationalized, and regarding the setting of Jimmu’s enthronement as 660 BC in the Western calendar around the Meiji era, he calculated its basis using complex calculation methods.

Utilizing profound knowledge of East Asian history, calendar methods, and the I Ching, he elucidated one important fact through his own calculations. He demonstrated that the chronological setting of the Nihon Shoki, established in 720 AD, eight years after the Kojiki, was not calculated based on actual historical facts, but was "artificially calculated backward" based on Chinese thought that influenced the compilation. He placed particular emphasis on the concept that cycles exist in the great revolutions seen in the thought of prophetic books called isho (緯書) in China. This is called shin'yu kakumei (辛酉革命説), the theory of the "Xin-You revolution"; according to the isho, there is a way of thinking that "a revolution occurs in the Xin-You year of the sexagenary cycle," and furthermore, it is recorded that if this Xin-You circulates 21 times (60 years × 21 times = 1260 years), an even more colossal revolution will occur (mainly theories of dynasty change or the appearance of a sage). Iijima, who saw through that the compilers of the Nihon Shoki were strongly influenced by this traditional Chinese thought, exposed the figure wherein they set their own temporal position to align with the great revolution of the 1260-year cycle based on this thought, legitimizing their political rule. This appears remarkably in the establishment of the hegemonic structure of the new era by the triangle of the shadow ruler Soga no Umako and the public leader Prince Shotoku in the reign of Empress Suiko in 601 AD. Here, the administrators of the time set 601 AD as the year of the great revolution based on the Xin-You revolution theory, and in order to ground it, they set the year of the great revolution one cycle prior—retracing 1260 years from there—to 660 BC, and placed the year of the enthronement of the first Emperor Jimmu there (601 AD – 1260 years = 660 BC).

Furthermore, regarding the astronomical records of ancient folklore spanning a long period after Emperor Jimmu, Iijima pointed out that these did not reflect records actually observed on the Japanese side, but were written in by bureaucrats at the time of compilation using calculation formulas of the Chinese calendar methods of the compilation era. Based on these profound insights, Iijima concluded that the year of Japan's founding, 660 BC, was not a historical fact, but a fiction constructed based on Chinese calendar methods and the mystical thought of the Xin-You revolution theory.

Personally, since encountering Iijima’s theory, I have thought there is no longer a need to question 660 BC; but conversely speaking, it means the political administrators of the time were that close to China. In fact, the possibility that scholars from the Chinese side were significantly involved in this compilation project is known. However, a troublesome problem surfaces here. If so, normally one would think compiling the Nihon Shoki alone would suffice; why was there a need to create another book called the Kojiki? Also, these two books are positioned as the oldest existing ones, but from the descriptions within the same works, it is indicated that there were already books to some extent on the Japanese side prior to that. In fact, the content recorded in both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki is not original, but constructed based on certain books at the time of compilation. In short—and this is essential—there was no fundamental difference in the base books for both the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki, but the purposes were completely different. If so, what was that purpose?

Actually, the dynamics of the domain created by these two books established in the first half of the 8th century is the invisible force supporting Japan as a tangible reality today.