Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering

WAYS OF FORGETTING,
WAYS OF REMEMBERING

ALSO BY JOHN W. DOWER

Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

Japan in War and Peace: Selected Essays

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

Empire and Aftermath:
Yoshida Shigeru and the Japanese Experience, 1878–1954

The Elements of Japanese Design:
A Handbook of Family Crests, Heraldry, and Symbolism

JAPAN IN THE MODERN WORLD

JOHN W. DOWER

© 2012 by John W. Dower

All rights reserved.

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Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2012

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Dower, John W.

  Ways of forgetting, ways of remembering: Japan in the modern world / John W. Dower.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-5955-8811-1 1. Japan--History--1945- 2. Japan--History--1945---Historiography. 3. World War, 1939-1945--Japan. 4. World War, 1939-1945--Japan--Historiography. 5. World War, 1939-1945--Social aspects--Japan. 6. World War, 1939-1945--Influence. 7. Collective memory--Japan--History--20th century. 8. Social change--Japan--History--20th century. 9. Japan--Politics and government--1945- 10. Japan--Social conditions--1945- I. Title.

DS889.15.D69 2012

940.53'52072--dc23

2011033861

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Preface

1. E.H. Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History

2. Race, Language, and War in Two Cultures: World War II in Asia

3. Japan's Beautiful Modern War

4. “An Aptitude for Being Unloved”: War and Memory in Japan

5. The Bombed: Hiroshimas and Nagasakis in Japanese Memory

6. A Doctor's Diary of Hiroshima, Fifty Years Later

7. How a Genuine Democracy Should Celebrate Its Past

8. Peace and Democracy in Two Systems: External Policy and Internal Conflict

9. Mocking Misery: Grassroots Satire in Defeated Japan

10. Lessons from Japan About War's Aftermath

11. The Other Japanese Occupation

Sources

Notes

Index

T
he eleven essays in this volume, with one exception, were originally published between 1993 and 2005. They follow upon a previous collection published by The New Press in 1993 under the title
Japan in War and Peace
.

The one exception is the first entry, an excerpt from a long essay titled “E.H. Norman, Japan, and the Uses of History” that I wrote as an introduction to an edited book of Norman's historical writings on Japan published in 1975. Several considerations prompted including this here. The essay was controversial. It was an early attempt to wrestle in a case-study way with how the questions historians ask usually reflect what E.H. Carr called the “buzzing” of their own times.
^*
Reprinting this thus offers a practical starting point for calling attention to the mottled history of writing about modern Japan in English between 1940 (when Norman published the first great scholarly study of the Meiji era and its legacies) and the late 1960s and early 1970s (when I was a graduate student and entry-level academic).

None of the texts have been edited or amended, apart from a few editorial changes and notations, and none of the essay titles have been changed. The “uses of history” phrase in the opening entry is apt in this regard, for it echoes the thematic “ways of forgetting, ways of remembering” title that covers this collection. We use history in many ways: consciously and subjectively, idealistically and perversely, to educate and to indoctrinate. This is addressed through various linguistic portals in today's academic parlance: memory; constructing or reconstructing the past; inventing and reinventing traditions; commemoration and sanitization or historical amnesia; what have you. I rely mostly on plain language here—memory, uses and abuses, how the focused gaze is simultaneously an averted gaze—and, both directly and indirectly, try to convey the complexities of forgetting and remembering through topical treatments of Japan in the modern world.

Most of the selections address Japan at war and after 1945. As such, they also have a great deal to say about the United States—not only about the intense intewrpenetration of the two nations over these many decades, but also about how the Japanese experience is used and misused in English-language commentaries. What is new in this volume are the introductions to each entry, in which I look back on my own compositions “as history” and reflect on the milieu in which they were composed.

January 2012

_____________

^*
E.H. Carr's little book of essays titled
What Is History
?, based on lectures delivered at Cambridge University and published in 1961, challenged the conceit of historical objectivity and was a provocative contribution to the historiographical debates of the 1960s.

WAYS OF FORGETTING,
WAYS OF REMEMBERING

E.H. Norman, appointed Canadian ambassador to Egypt in 1956, committed suicide in Cairo on April 4, 1957, after being accused in Senate hearings in the United States of being untrustworthy and possibly a Communist spy. He was forty-seven years old, and had been deeply involved in addressing the crisis that erupted in 1956 when the United Kingdom, France, and Israel invaded Egypt after the Egyptian president Gambal Nassar nationalized the Suez Canal. Norman's mentor and staunch supporter, the Canadian diplomat and later prime minister Lester Pearson, was awarded the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize for his leading role in creating the United Nations emergency force that defused the crisis and became the prototype for later UN peacekeeping activities
.

The McCarthyist accusations against Norman referred back to the mid-1930s, when Norman became involved in left-wing and Communist activities while a student at Cambridge University's Trinity College, where he was awarded a B.A. in classics in 1935. Born and raised in Japan in a missionary family, and fluent in Japanese, in 1933 Norman had completed an earlier B.A. in classics at the University of Toronto's Victoria College. In 1936, he became a graduate student at Harvard, where he earned a doctorate in Japanese history in 1940. His dissertation was published that same year by the International Secretariat of the Institute of Pacific Relations, under the title
Japan's Emergence as a Modern State: Political and Economic Problems of the Meiji
Period.
Stylistically eloquent, and intellectually enriched by Norman's deep familiarity with Western history and historiography
, Japan's Emergence
drew on a range of Japanese sources including scholarship by Marxist historians who until the 1930s—when the imperial state succeeded in suppressing the “dangerous thoughts” of the academic and political left—had engaged in rigorous debates about state formation, authoritarianism, capitalism, and “incomplete revolution” in the decades that followed the Meiji Restoration of 1868
.

Between 1940 and 1949, despite now being embarked on a diplomatic career, Norman wrote a number of incisive long essays on late feudal and early modern Japan. On the one hand, he devoted close attention to the “feudal background” of post-Restoration Japanese politics. At the same time, however, he took care to introduce vivid case studies of grassroots protest and agitation. One of these treatments dealt with millennial movements (“mass hysteria”); another with an iconoclastic eighteenth-century physician and scholar (And
ō
Sh
ō
eki) outraged by the social injustice of his times; another with peasant protest and the post-Restoration introduction of military conscription in a society hitherto dominated by a samurai caste; yet another with one of the earliest radical right-wing societies of the modern era (the Geny
ō
sha). The “freedom and people's rights
” (jiy
Å«
minken)
movement of the 1870s and 1880s that the Meiji oligarchs effectively stifled by creating a Prussian-inspired constitutional monarchy under the emperor was a major example, in Norman's telling, of an indigenous tradition of liberal political protest
.

Following Japan's defeat in 1945, Norman was posted to Tokyo as the Canadian representative to the U.S.-led Allied occupation that lasted until 1952. There, his personal counsel coupled with his historical writings—especially
Japan's Emergence
—were regarded with enormous respect. In the critical early years of the occupation, Norman's pioneer study of 1940 became a bible of sorts to many reformist American planners and administrators who found themselves engaged in attempting to “democratize” Japan. This was an exceptional moment indeed: where an authoritarian and aggressively expansionist state had been shattered; where the conquerors held unprecedented authority; where progressive political idealism prevailed for a while; and where pragmatic thinking about the
future as well as the here and now demanded keen analysis of the nation's recent and more distant past
.

Norman's writings spoke to this challenging moment in several compelling ways. His argument that the Meiji state had imposed “revolution from above,” and in the process snuffed out a more thoroughgoing revolution from below, encouraged postwar reformers who saw the occupation as an opportunity to complete this thwarted revolution by doing away with the undemocratic institutional legacies of the Meiji state. Simultaneously, his documentation of popular protests dating back to feudal times gave substance to the argument that promoting democracy, pluralism, and greater egalitarianism in the form of civil and human rights in defeated Japan was not an ethnocentric exercise in trying to impose alien “Western” beliefs and values on an incorrigibly backward and inherently hierarchical society. Far more than most of his missionary, diplomatic, and academic peers, Norman conveyed genuine respect for the aspirations and capabilities of ordinary Japanese. His Japanese acquaintances, many of them scholars, spoke and wrote movingly about him after his death. In the words of one of these mourners, a good part of Norman's writings on Japan had been “in praise of lesser names.
”

My interest in Norman was kindled in the late 1960s, and the excerpt that follows here is taken from a long rumination—almost one hundred pages overall—by a newly minted historian just embarking on an academic career. In the small world of Japanese studies, this essay was regarded as mildly incendiary. It was, in any case, impolitic; and now, decades later, it may seem to be little more than a musty sample of historiographic debates of a bygone time. Still, I have titled this collection
Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering,
and this early piece marks a moment shortly after I had turned to history from an original concentration on literature—the moment, more or less, when I began asking myself what doing history really entails as a discipline, and how fixing on a subject simultaneously involves neglecting other subjects and lines of inquiry. In Japanese academic parlance, which I was absorbing at the time, this is called
mondai ishiki, “
problem consciousness.” Remembering—or constructing or reconstructing the past, as we would say these days—inevitably involves neglecting and forgetting. The focused gaze and averted gaze go hand in hand
.