Last time I lived in Japan, the LDP lost control of the Diet, and for a year and a half there was a Socialist Prime Minister in charge of an implausible coalition between the Japanese Socialist Party (JSP) and the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). The Democratic Party of Japan, which just took control of the lower house of the Diet, was formed in the aftermath of that coalition: the more liberal elements of the LDP combined with the more moderate elements of the JSP.¹ This left a more conservative LDP and a more Socialist SDP, and also, as a side effect, left the LDP again in charge of the government, in coalition with the Komeito and other conservative groups. Another side effect: the bushy eyebrows and grandfatherly face of Murayama Tomiichi were immortalized in the “Ton-chan” dolls sold by the JSP; I bought one, thinking that this might be “historic.”²

You could hardly tell from the news reports coming out of Japan at the moment.³ I suppose that I’m not surprised by the lack of respect given to the mid-90s political turmoil: it was inconclusive and sloppy, not the kind of clear-cut “historic” event that makes for banner headlines. But what came out of it was an LDP that was, honestly, destined to fail: instead of representing the middle two-thirds of the Japanese political spectrum, it represented a heavily right-oriented one-third, while the DPJ took a big chunk of what was left. Essentially, the LDP split, probably the natural end to a party that was a coalition to begin with, formed out of a Cold War fear that Japan’s leftist parties might put aside their differences long enough to win control of the Diet. While it took a few elections, and another decade of disappointing economic stagnation, the left wing of the former LDP has overtaken the right wing of the former LDP, and a former member of the LDP is going to be Prime Minister.⁴

Is this “historic“? Well, it depends, of course. If the DP turns out to be more or less just like the LDP, then it’s no more historic than Pepsi™ overtaking Coca-Cola™. If the DP turns out to be a genuinely center-left party which reduces international entanglements while successfully fostering economic development, it could actually be a revival of the Yoshida Doctrine. That might actually be interesting, especially since it could mean a shift away from the normalization discourses we’ve been hearing so much of. I guess it’s a bit too soon to write the new narrative.

1. This is a rough approximation. The faction politics of the LDP did not neatly divide along ideological lines, but some sense of policy alignment was starting to become clearer when the split happened
2. Actually, I bought two: one for me and one for my parents.
3. I want to thank Adam Richards for his tireless political blogging during this election, possibly the best reportage in English this time around.
4. I don’t think anyone’s going to make plush toys out of Hatoyama Yukio, though he’d make a credible daruma.

My copanelists on Saturday were political scientists, and it was a good update for me on what what’s going on with Japan in the last ten years or so. “Normalization” is the name of the game: Japan’s political spectrum and international relations are starting to look a lot less like Yoshida’s vision and a lot more like a pretty normal regional power.

Keiko Hirata from CSU Northridge looked at the basic divisions between political theories at work in Japan. Many political scientists have divided them into four groups: pacifist (isolationists), mercantilists (internationalist), normalists (internationalist) and nationalists (isolationist, sort of). Yoshida’s domestic economic and non-entanglement orientation makes him a mercantilist, but the normalists are the group which seems to be in ascendance at the moment. Though Hirata didn’t talk about this, it seems to me that the nationalists are the group which has made that possible: their extreme views on remilitarization and national identity have made the gradual remilitarization and international engagement of the normalists seem, well, normal.¹ The most interest aspect of the categories as far as I was concerned is that they have widely disparate views of history: The pacifists, of course, emphasize the irresponsibility and horror of WWII; mercantilists emphasize the post-war recovery, seeing the war as a period of national destruction; the normalists take a kind of “dark valley” approach; the nationalists see the early 20th century as a period of healthy growth and cultural pride.

Gaye Christoffersen, one of Soka’s own, presented a surprisingly interesting look at the issue of multilateral maritime security. This has become pretty hot lately, what with the Somali pirate situation, and the multilateral, bottom-up coalition which has been solving the problem out there actually has its roots in the coalition which has taken responsibility for the Malacca Straights. There, the US tried to organize a top-down security system, but failed, while China and Japan led a slower, but more successful, bottom-up group. The punch line to this is that Japan’s Coast Guard has been spearheading things, because it isn’t bound by the Naval SDF’s limitations on the use of force; to equalize things, Japan just last week passed an anti-piracy bill allowing multilateral agreements and the use of force on the high seas. Normalization continues. China’s concerns about Japan’s normalization are a big deal still, but in multilateral/regional situations, they seem to be able to work together.

Hideyuki Sakai talked about “minilateralism,” which apparently is a kind of high-level collusion among a few members used to save multilateral agreements and regimes. Japan, it seems, excels at these kinds of negotiations, especially on environmental issues. Interestingly, in the next session, Tsuneo Akaha talked about international migration and human security issues, and the problem of protecting migrants, especially illegal ones, given legal and economic regimes that criminalize but also exploit their presence. In this case, multi-lateralism is proceeding very slowly, and Japan’s role in the process has not been all that helpful, since it has a very narrow view of migration and migrant rights. That’s not really news, of course, but it does demonstrate something useful about the direction things might still have to go, and the issues on which “bottom-up” and minilateralism aren’t going to be all that effective.

As Tsuneo noted in the discussion period, North Korea was kind of the elephant in the living room through these discussions….

1. I was a little surprised that she didn’t reference the “Overton Window,” but maybe I’ve been reading too much ScienceBlogs lately.

George O. Totten III passed away at the beginning of this month; I just saw the obituary on H-Japan. Though I knew Totten mostly through his scholarship on the pre-WWII Japanese left, he published widely on Korea, Korean Americans, and China as well. I did meet him two years ago in Honolulu at ASPAC: He was quite talkative, sharing stories from his career and childhood, catching up with old friends but more than happy to involve younger scholars in the conversation as well. I didn’t realize at the time the extent of his work outside of Japanese political science — that he nominated former Korean president Kim Dae Jung for his Nobel Peace Prize gives you some idea of the extent of his interests and his judgement. He was really one of the few scholars I’ve ever heard of who covered all of East Asia as well as diaspora communities. Quite a record, and an extraordinary life.

For the conclusion to my ASPAC blogging, I want to talk about the panel which invited me to serve as moderator. It was a pleasure, and not just because three of the four of us were Harvard Ph.D.s., though catching up with gossip was fun. The papers covered a solid range of early modern and modern topics — outcastes in the early 19th century, historiography of rebel domains in imperial Japan, political violence in the 1950s — and was uniformly excellent research which should soon see publication. My introduction tried to tie things together thusly

Marginalizing discourses are, of course, actually intended to normalize. These are not out-groups for the sake of individuality or obtuseness, but groups trying to function within society, negotiating from positions of weakness, but using available leverage — function, ideology, resistance — which is considered legitimate. But there is a trend away from formal stratification, through uniformity towards equality: modernity shifts from marginalizing people to marginalizing behavior.

Maren Ehlers study of “The Koshirō of Ōno Domain: An Outcast Organization within Domain Society” made a strong case that hinin in small communities were both socially oppressed but also socially useful, and that they could leverage their position into new privileges as the needs of domain society shifted their functions. Their status within the community was clearly marked, but restrictions were often ignored due to the nature of small-town life. She presented a particularly interesting case where the Koshirō were asked to take on duties as executioners in exchange for new privileges (right to wear short swords, plus a stipend), even though those privileges were protested by commoners, but eventually the Koshirō asked to be relieved of those new privileges and the duties that went with them, on the grounds that it lowered their status to be associated with traditional eta work. This reinforces the argument Botsman makes in Punishment and Power: that the outcaste groups actively negotiated their status and function, from a weak but not powerless position due to their state functions. Maren’s dissertation is on poverty relief, and ought to add a nice new dimension to our understanding of the functions of government in the Early Modern era.

Hiraku Shimoda’s “Making and Unmaking a Cautionary Tale: Aizu Domian in Imperial Historical Discourse” was a fascinating look at how partisans of the Shogunal Loyalist domain reshaped the history of the Restoration wars with the collusion of central authorities who wanted to construct a uniform national narrative of Imperial service. I was quite taken with the way in which the former rebels were redeemed through a — largely fanciful and ahistorical — narrative of a nation in which everyone sought the greater good and were loyal to the same transcendant sovereign, even when they were shooting at each other. Hiraku’s larger work on regional identity will certainly be essential reading for those of us doing local history, and for those of you who haven’t yet taken it seriously enough!

Eiko Maruko’s chronicled two episodes in “Violence as a Discursive Weapon: Diet Politics in the 1950s” both of which involved Socialist v. LDP clashes. Both parties claimed the mantle of “Defenders of democracy”: the LDP claimed that the Socialists were trying to impose a minority will by violence, invoking the recent past; the Socialists claimed that the LDP were trying to steamroll minorities with an uncompromising majoritarianism which they likened to fascism. The LDP called on security forces (especially in the 1958 case) and successfully cast the Socialists as the aggressors, as an immature group in a maturing democratic society. These clashes were, in a sense, precursors to the 1960 Security Treaty conflicts, but Eiko didn’t go into that. Her larger project on political violence from the Bakumatsu to the Ampo Riots ought to be a solid attention-grabber for undergrads, as well as adding a very interesting dimension to the whole modernity/democracy discussion.¹

There’s so much to look forward to in the next few years, in terms of what we’re going to be reading and what we can teach from.

1. I love the way in which it completely ignores conventional periodization, too.

In an argument about Japanese-American draft-resistor internees during WWII, Eric Muller wrote

in my book I argue that vocal and visible protest of government orders are more distinctive facets of American popular culture than of Japanese popular culture. (I do not suggest that protest is absent from Japanese tradition, or that compliance is absent from American tradition; I simply maintain that as a comparative matter, vocal public protest has a stronger American lineage than Japanese.)

Do you [ed.: Ken Masugi] see this as true?

If you think it false, would you share with us prominent examples of the protest tradition in Japanese culture that match the Boston Tea Party, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death,” the National Woman’s Party, lunch counter protests and civil rights sit-ins, the Stonewall riots, the Wounded Knee protest, etc. etc. etc.

To be honest, I’m on Eric Muller’s side of this debate, but this passage rankled somewhat. Perhaps it’s my background in social history, my early exposure to Mikiso Hane (even before I found out that my wife knew him) or just my contrarian, blogger-nature, but I can’t just let it stand.

First, there’s the comparative history aspect: I can’t think of any other national history that has such a distinguished tradition of civil political protest: perhaps the English? The French get too revolutionary too easily. Ghandian India, or pre-1990 South Africa perhaps? In the last twenty years or so, the ubiquity of marches and demonstrations has taken some of the edge off, though if you limit the field to “events critiquing one’s own rulers” then you’ve a much smaller data set. Whether it rises to the level of a “tradition” in that exceptionalist American self-congratulatory sense is another question: I’m not sure that Muller’s list couldn’t be dismissed as “prominent examples” in contrast to a fairly conservative and gradualist tradition only recently challenged by strong civil rights movements.

There are, as Muller concedes “prominent examples of dissent in Japanese history.” Some would argue that there’s more than that: from the peasant uprisings of the Tokugawa era to the rice riots of 1919, demo against the Security Treaty, the lawsuits of Minamata, individual acts of self-destruction, literary and cultural satire, and speaker trucks, I think that there is a reasonably strong strain of public self-criticism and scolding, particularly given an environment of repression which (at most times in the last century and a half) goes well beyond that which has existed in the US, even during its colonial era.

What do you think?

Non Sequitur: Sumo Wrestlers in New York [registration required]. Wait, actually, it’s S.U.M.O., and the organizers swear it’s unscripted….