This
study is concerned with that portion of society referred to as "the middle
class (es)" in American literature but which
Europeans would tend to call the petite bourgeoisie (skilled workers,
technicians, small businessmen, and white-collar workers including
intellectuals). It builds upon my earlier work The Self-Made Man in Meiji
Japanese Thought (University of California Press, 1981) and uses somewhat
similar materials but concentrates on the 1920s-1940s and covers a broader
social spectrum. It is in part an attempt to provide a Japanese equivalent to
the classic work by David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social Revolution (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).
My
central concern is the question of how did the economic and social changes of
the 1920s, especially the Great Depression, impact the various elements of the
middle class(es) and in turn
how did their experiences relate to the rise of militarism and fascism. This is
a relation little studied by Japanese scholars who have tended to assert that
the social basis of Japanese fascism was the lower (old) middle class plus the
"big bourgeoisie" ( zaibatsu ). The
intelligentsia (new middle class) is portrayed as either indifferent to fascism
or forced into compliance
This
view was most thoroughly stated in the oft-cited essays of Maruyama Masao. This
study shows that this analysis reflects more what Japanese intellectuals such
as Maruyama wanted to believe about themselves rather than what the historical
record actually reveals.
While
researching a concluding chapter to Self-Made Man ,
and examining placement guides aimed at university graduates, I discovered that
militarism had had a very positive impact on the Japanese intelligentsia . It
had brought deficit spending that stimulated the economy and a proliferation of
government agencies both at home and in Japan's colonial areas. This expansion
created a seller's market for the intelligentsia by 1937, a sharp contrast with
the preceding two decades when up to seventy percent of higher education
graduates did not have firm jobs even one year after graduation. This relation
gave the intelligentsia a stake in expansionism and state control (national socialism). Writings of the time stress that state
planning and control had to be the work of specialists (= intelligentsia
) rather than politicians if Japan was to succeed in its goal of
building a national defense state to liberate Asia.
Comparison
of the economic impact of militarism with that on other segments of the middle class(es) led to further doubts
about the quality of postwar Japanese interpretations of militarism and its
supporters. In contrast to intellectual enthusiasm for a planned economy,
social control, and grandiose schemes for Asian unity (under Japanese
technocratic control), I found criticism of government policy from both large
and small business. With rare exceptions, business in general was hostile to
the National Socialist inspired proposals of technocrats and academics. Small
business was resentful of the near monopoly enjoyed by state-sponsored
capitalism in Manchuria and other colonial areas.
When the
group by group distribution of profits from militarism are examined relative to
the standing of each group as a result of the Great Depression, previously
inexplicable "peculiarities" of militarism and fascism in Japan
appear quite consistent with issues of class self-interest. By looking beyond
the pages of publications aimed at the intelligentsia such as Kaizô [Reformation], Chûô
kôron [Central Review], Shakai
seisaku jihô [Social
Policy Bulletin], and Nihon hyôron [Japan
Review] to publications such as Shôtenkai
[Retail World] and Jitsugyô Nihon [Business
Japan], the reasons academics and technocrats welcomed militarism and fascism
and the reasons the old middle class did not appear in terms of direct class
interest. Similarly the financial press, publications such as Tôyô keizai shinpô [The Oriental Economist], Daiyamondo
[Diamond], and Ekonomisuto [Economist], show wide
variation in business enthusiasm, again tied directly individual firm
expectations for gains or losses from militarism and fascism.
Although
"agrarian fascism" has loomed large in Japanese accounts, the
agrarian sector receives limited coverage here. The technocrats and academics
who supported the militarization of Japan in the late 1930s and early 1940s and
who sought to introduce European fascist models had no significant agrarian
connections. Their counterparts in the military had at most a romantic rhetoric
concerning agriculture even as their programs were thoroughly industrial and
national socialist. On close examination the same pattern is found in the
terrorists of the 1920s and 1930s. The agrarian sector is not unimportant, but
its role in carrying Japan in militaristic and fascistic directions is trivial
compared to that of technocrats, fascist-inspired academics, and high
technology industrial firms looking to prosper from larger armaments budgets.
While a
structured comparison of the Japanese experience with that of Europe is beyond
the scope of this study, European and American examples have been introduced at
various points. The use of the term fascism inherently requires this.
Comparison shows that many of the differences between fascism in Japan and in
Europe were matters of degree, not of kind. Too much Japanese (and American)
writing, has idealized Western culture, even fascism, and used this idealized
vision as a basis for judging Japan as "peculiar," "unique,"
or even "pathological." At most points, comparison with Europe (and
the US) brings Japan more into the mainstream of 1920s-1940s experience than in
previous accounts.
Indeed,
comparison brings to light features of the Anglo-American experience that have
faded from memory. When Japanese technocrats and academics professed admiration
for Mussolini, Hitler, FDR, and Stalin in a single breath, they recall an era
when "technocracy" was thought to be the cure for American ills,
"brain trusters" professed open admiration
of Mussolini, and "progressive intellectuals" celebrated Stalinism.
While this monograph is at one level a social history of the urban middle
classes in Japan, it is also intellectual (or perhaps more properly
intelligentsia ) history, for it examines the role of relative class standing
in determining which ideas capture the imagination of the intellectual elite.
This is
a very tentative outline and thematic statement for my intended monograph on
"Militarism and the Middle Classes in Modern Japan." The subjects
listed here are those that appeared important with the project was first conceived. Some may be trimmed and others added
during the course of writing and revision. The balance and grouping of subjects
can be expected to change.
In as
much as this outline is intended primarily for personal use, it has been
subjected only to minimal electronic proofreading.
Certain
of the themes discussed below have been developed in more detail in previously
published papers .
"The
Mouse that Roared: Saitô Takao, Conservative
Critic of Japan's 'Holy War' in China." Journal of Japanese Studies 25:2 (Summer, 1999): 331-360.
"The
Impact of Military Procurements on the Old Middle Classes in Japan,
1931-1941." Japan Forum . (October, 1992):
247-265.
See also
Transformation and Expansion ,
a chapter on modern Japanese history for the Sheffield MA in Japanese Studies.
This
section will deal with the points made in the introduction to this outline.
From the
Russo-Japanese War (1894-1895) to World War I, Japan came of age in terms of
the middle class(es). To the
large old middle class of shopkeepers, artisans, and petty manufacturers, was
added a new middle class of white-collar workers who performed the clerical and
lower level managerial functions of an increasingly complex economy.
Recognition
and self-consciousness came in the World War I period as this new class was
deprived of economic stability, one of the key attractions of the white-collar
life style. Yearly inflation rates exceeding 100 percent produced misery for
those on salary even as they produced narikin
(parvenu) among both merchants and skilled blue-collar workers.
This
chapter explores the size, structure, and life-style of various elements of the
middle class in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Some of the
topics include:
+
the pre-twentieth century middle class(es) in Japan;
+
demographic changes and the rise of the new middle
class;
+
urbanization in the first decades of the twentieth
century;
+ narikin , the rise and
fall of Suzuki shôten (Suzuki trading);
+
inflation and petty white-collar workers;
+
skilled labor during the armaments boom;
+
the job market for graduates of elite higher education;
As in
Europe and the United States the various elements of the new and old middle class(es) were whipsawed by
economic and political developments in the 1920s. During these years university
educated youth experienced not merely a difficulty in finding employment but
unemployment of the variety previously only known by blue-collar workers.
Contemporary accounts saw the difficulty increasing with educational level.
Those coming from the most elite institutions were, in the short run, the
hardest hit.
Skilled blue-collar workers were hurt by the end of war procurements
contracts and by the cut backs stemming from the naval arms reduction
agreements of the early 1920s. Firms discharged workers without even lip
service to the alleged Japanese practice of "lifetime employment."
The old lower middle class suffered from the general economic decline, bank
failures, department stores, the coop movement, and a swelling of the ranks as
discharged blue and white-collar workers sought to hang on in the urban
environment by entering petty retailing.
Subjects
for this chapter include:
+
demographics and the employment difficulty;
+
disarmament and its contribution to unemployment;
+
industrial rationalization and unemployment;
+
party politics and instability in the civil service;
+
women as competitors in the white-collar labor market;
+
the personality of the successful applicant for
white-collar employment in a period when there was a surplus of educated youth;
+
the employment difficulty and the appeal of Marxism;
+
the movement of elite graduates to teaching and the
police in lieu of more desirable jobs;
+
unemployment statistics and the disguising of the
crisis;
+
the life of unemployed white-collar workers;
+
blue- versus white-collar unemployment;
+
pay cuts for employed white-collar workers;
+
white-collar political and union activities in
response to the depression;
+
relief measures for the unemployed;
+
decadence and diversions during the depression years;
+
the rise of cafe society, "modern boys" and
"modern girls";
+
the old lower middle class and petty retailing as
unemployment buffers;
+
the old lower middle class and the anti-department
store, anti-cooperative movement;
+
popular religious movements and the old lower middle
class;
+
Marxist writers and the crisis of the middle class(es);
+
Two or more chapters may be appropriate for this general subject.
Late in
1931 elements in the Kwantung Army used a staged "provocation" as a
pretext for a military takeover of Manchuria. In 1932 Manchurian independence
under Japanese tutelage was proclaimed. Conventionally the proclamation of
Manchurian independence under the control of the Kwantung Army is seen as the
one of the most significant elements in the development of militarism and
fascism in Japan. The domestic economic impact has essentially been ignored.
Manchuria
proved a godsend to unemployed college students and low level bureaucrats
struggling through the seniority system of a stagnant domestic civil service. A
whole new bureaucratic order was created offering not just government
employment but wages and perks at two to three times
domestic levels. With the backing of an army that was hostile to proprietary
capitalism and a cowed Manchurian populace to serve them, young technocrats
were free to experiment with all elements of a centrally planned society.
Skilled
blue collar workers benefited from extensive hiring by the South Manchurian
Railroad, Kwantung Army fostered enterprises in Manchuria, and by the work
created through massive orders to domestic industry for the building of the new
Manchuria.
Small
business was largely frozen out of Manchuria except in the so-called water
trades. Small retailers could not compete with the Manchurians. Small
manufacturers had little to offer the planned Manchurian economy with its
emphasis on high technology and gigantic enterprises.
Old-line
capitalism was frozen out of Manchuria by Marxist influenced Kwantung Army
types and their academic and technocratic supporters. Nissan, the largest of
the so-called new zaibatsu ( shinkô
zaibatsu ) line firms was invited to Manchuria by the military in a sweetheart
deal far beyond that associated with the old line zaibatsu. Its attractiveness
to the military stemming from its technology and its diversified ownership, the
latter a pattern that the American occupation would later force on the old line
zaibatsu as part of its program to demilitarize Japan!
Farmers,
who loomed large in ideological pronouncements about the new Manchurian
society, could not compete with Manchurians and Korean immigrants. Held out as
a promised land for Japanese farmers suffering under the exactions of landlords
and the pressures of their own numbers, Manchuria became a paradise for
bureaucrats. Leading technocrats who later sought to create a new order in Japan
almost invariably practiced first on the hapless Manchurians.
Comparative
analysis of the impact of Manchuria and domestic response to it includes the
following points among others:
+
the student job market and Manchuria;
+
academics as advisors in Manchuria;
+
the life style of Japanese technocrats in Manchuria;
+
the South Manchurian Railroad and its manifold
activities;
+
the South Manchurian Railroad as an employer of
intellectuals: the Mantetsu chôsabu;
+
anti-capitalism in the Kwantung Army;
+
the economic basis of zaibatsu hostility to Manchurian
development and to Kwantung Army control;
+
the possibilities for opposition to militarism seen in
disputes between Japanese technocrats and the Kwantung Army;
+
Nissan and the Kwantung Army;
+
the new zaibatsu ( shinkô
zaibatsu ) compared to the old line zaibatsu;
+
zaibatsu and other business holdings in Manchuria
prior to "independence";
+
responses to Manchuria in business magazines versus
those in publications aimed at the intelligentsia;
+
regional differences in business responses to military
adventurism in Manchuria and China;
+
competition between Manchurian and Japanese firms for
funds and markets;
+
Japanese journalism and the selling of Manchuria to the Japanese public;
+
skilled blue-collar workers and the Manchurian job
market;
+
proletarian political parties and the promise of
Manchuria;
+
the exclusion of the old lower middle class from the
Manchurian market;
+
the rhetoric of emigration versus the reality;
Journalism
of the late 1930s identified three major groups as supporting fascism in Japan.
Most prominent were several strains of "new-bureaucrats" ( shin-kanryô ) or
"renovation bureaucrats" ( kakushin kanryô ) who looked to a controlled economy ( tôsei keizai ) and economic
blocs for domestic reform, which was linked to the prosecution of Japan's
overseas military adventures.
Theoretical
backing came from academic specialists who had long lamented that their
expertise was ignored in an order dominated by corrupt politicians representing
specialized interests. Especially after the outbreak of large-scale warfare in
China, these academics found that militarism produced a demand for their
services and offered an entree to power. Militarism in effect handed academics
and bureaucrats power that Marxism said had to be
taken by revolution. Anti-capitalism in the Kwantung Army, the apparent success
of Manchuria under state planning, and the rise of what were seen as
technocratic regimes in Europe and the United States inspired Marxist
influenced bureaucrats and academics to feel that history was on their side.
Big
business was mixed in its reaction. Old-line big business preferred the status
quo and disliked bureaucratic intervention. New high technology firms ( shinkô zaibatsu ) led by
founders trained in science or engineering were positive advocates of
restructuring and greater government intervention. The product mix of their
firms was such that they profited directly from militarism or even required
subsidies to survive.
The
bureaucratic and academic thrust for a technocratic state culminated in the New
Order movement and the Imperial Rule Assistance Association (IRAA) under Prince
Konoe in 1940-1941. The principal opposition to the
New Order came from big business which disliked the clear technocratic threat
to its dominance and from the "religious" right ( kannen uyoku ) which saw
the explicit foreign inspiration in the New Order and the IRAA. Opposition
groups saw the New Order as both "red" and fascist.
+
Although the New Order was strictly speaking a movement of 1940-1941, the term
here, in lower case, is used as a synonym for bureaucratic and intellectual
support of widespread technocratic control and intervention in the economy, and
the weakening of the Diet.
Other,
related themes to be dealt with in this chapter:
+
intellectuals as ghost writers for the military;
+
the training of military technocrats in the Imperial
Universities, especially Tôdai;
+
the fight for technocratic control ( tôsei ) over the economy in electric power, through
war mobilization measures, etc;
+
cartels as a prelude to state socialism;
+
the mixing of public and private economic activities
through operating entities ( eidan ), trade
associations, etc;
+
the movement of bureaucrats to corporate boards ( amakudari );
+
brain trusts, think tanks and the increasing promise of power for academic
advisors under the New Order;
+
the professionalization of corporate management;
+
the conversion of the zaibatsu ( zaibatsu tenkô ), modernization of management under fascist
pressure;
+
business enthusiasm for the New Order as a function of
technology level and scale;
+
regional differences in business enthusiasm, Kansai
free trade versus Kantô control ( tôsei );
+
left wing attacks on Saitô
Takao, the last "liberal" to challenge militarism;
+
liberalism as laissez faire and its attack from the
left and from the right;
+
the "religious right" and the attack on the
IRAA as a "new bakufu";
+
Pan-Asianism as an ideology for continued war and an
increasing role for technocrats and academics;
+
the need for continued war to justify technocratic and
academic intervention;
+
the New Order as an attempt to complete the Meiji
Restoration, the incomplete technocratic revolution;
+
geographers and the rationalization of fascism in
Japan;
+
the "decline of the West" and other
intellectual justifications for fascism;
+
Konoe and the quest for a charismatic leader ala
Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, or FDR;
+
the new order and its appeal to "youth";
+
anti-Semitism and New Order intellectuals;
+
economic blocs: intellectual enthusiasm, business
hostility;
+
academic and popular proponents of state socialism;
+
the Manchurian state socialists: Kishi Nobusuke,
Yoshino Shinji, etc.
+
"reds" and the effort to establish fascism in Japan: the Kikaku'in (Cabinet Planning Board) incident and related
purges;
+
Konoe and the "red plot" thesis, the idea
that Japan had been maneuvered into war by "reds" who expected to use
the chaos of defeat as a chance for a communist revolution.
Conventional
Japanese treatments and derivative American works describe the period from
1931-1945, and especially the years from 1937-1945, as a "dark
valley" ( kurai tanima ) in terms of civil liberties and living standards.
The Japanese people appear as the helpless victims of militarism.
This
chapter argues that the "dark valley" view is applicable only to a
small portion of the period, primarily from 1943 on. While it is doubtless
psychologically comforting to Japanese of this period to believe that they
endured fifteen years of victimization, the contemporary journalistic and
statistical record testifies to the contrary. For most of the period militarism
brought increasing employment, greater real income, and overall prosperity. If
any group experienced a prolonged "dark valley," it was small
business. Other groups, particularly college graduates, academics, rank and
file white-collar workers ( sarariiman
), skilled blue-collar workers, and high-technology industry all enjoyed
increasing prosperity at least through 1941.
Themes
dealt with in this chapter will include:
+
the appearance of blue-collar narikin
(parvenu) in the munitions industry;
+
the role of militarism in raising the status of skilled
blue-collar workers;
+
the role of military production priorities in
producing labor and agrarian reforms that had been prevented by elite
opposition during peace time;
+
shortages of consumer goods as evidence of increased
purchasing power and broadened markets rather than as proof of deprivation;
+
the conscription system and the avoidance of the costs
of militarism by students and academics;
+
increases in the status and funding of science and
scientists under militarism;
+
the enthusiasm of high technology industry and its
engineering and scientific managers for national socialist economic systems;
+
the proliferation of think tanks and the introduction
of academic specialists into government planning;
+
military production priorities and the suffering of
the old lower middle class;
+
the need for and ineffectiveness of relief measures
for the old lower middle class under militarism;
+
bureaucratic and military hostility to the old lower
middle class;
+
the Japanese wartime experience compared to that of
the European and Asian combatants;
+
the misuse of statistics from this period in postwar
writing;
Structured
comparison of data produced by this study with the analyses of militarism and
fascism found in post-surrender Japanese and American writing reveals that
academic works, journalism, and government reports (SCAP) were sometimes
overtly mendacious, often marked by selective memory, and commonly substituted
comfortable impressions for careful research that might contradict
ideologically pleasing conclusions.
Most
analyses from this period fail to distinguish between extreme nationalism that
would preserve the status quo and extreme nationalism coupled to a
revolutionary political vision. Fascism and militarism are almost never
discussed in terms of their affinity for National Socialism and economic
planning. The effect is to understate intellectual and bureaucratic enthusiasm
for fascism at large.
Most
analyses ignore the late 1930s and early 1940s, and on the Japanese side,
studiously avoid the naming of names. Much allegedly analytical writing is
little more than exercises in asserting, "I was okay. You were okay."
Cuts and euphemistic phrasing were the norm in institutional histories and
personal biographies.
Specific
themes to be considered in this chapter include:
+
the tendency to concentrate on the "period of
preparation" (1931-1936) while ignoring the "period of
consummation" (1937-1945);
+
the failure to demonstrate a connection between
"precursors to fascism" from the early 1930s and the regime that
actually resulted in the late 1930s and early 1940s;
+
failure to make use of late 1930s-1940s journalistic
sources in post-surrender scholarship;
+
the failure to consider the bureaucracy as a political
actor despite prewar accounts of the role of "reform" and
"renovation" bureaucrats in pushing fascism;
+
the confusion of symptoms of militarism and fascism
(military training in schools, the growth of the armaments industry) with
causes;
+
deleting without notice embarrassing wartime writings from post-surrender
compilations;
+
vita and biographical reference works that delete or
disguise wartime activities;
+
a more forgiving standard for reporting the wartime
activities of those who claimed post-surrender status as
"progressive" than the unrepentant;
+
the tendency to exclude right wing academics from the
discussion of intellectual responses to militarism;
+
the tendency to exclude elite, university trained
technocrats from the discussion of the intelligentsia ( interi
) and its responses to militarism;
+
comparisons of Japan with Germany (or Italy) using
selective or unrepresentative data from the European experience;
+
the acceptance and praise by American academics of
Japanese writing based on patently false comparisons with the European
experience;
+
the acceptance of explanatory formulas (E. H. Norman,
for example) that ignored the whole of twentieth century development;
+
treating the "fifteen years war" as a unit, using examples drawn only
from the last and most repressive phase;
+
asserting the role of terror in Japan without explicit comparison to other
authoritarian regimes such as the USSR under Stalin;
+
the exclusion of non-Japanese opposition, especially
Korean, from discussions of the possibility of protest;
+
generalizing about big business as a whole from limited examples drawn
primarily from high technology firms least fitting the zaibatsu model;
+
treating the behavior of large, complex business and bureaucratic entities in
the abstract rather than in terms of the individuals in control;
+
the failure to study individual career patterns and
individual wartime activities, particularly of academics;
+
the exclusion of economic factors from studies of
ideological conversion ( tenkô );
It is
common in Japanese speech and writing to make a sharp distinction between
prewar ( senzen ) and
postwar ( sengo ) social, political, and economic
relations. A similar stress is found in the writings of those involved in the
American occupation of Japan (SCAP). This chapter argues that many of the
social, political, economic, and intellectual aspects that characterized Japan
during the high growth years of the 1950s-1970s were linear extensions of
patterns that developed during the war years. More often than not SCAP is shown
to have strengthened patterns associated with militarism rather than destroying
these. Major elements of Japanese wartime ideology appear to have a prominent
place in contemporary Japanese popular culture, transcending conventional
left-right dichotomies.
Some of
the elements to be covered in this chapter include:
+
the "entrance examination hell" ( shiken jigoku ) and university
pecking order;
+
the "squad" ( shûdan
) as an unit of instruction in elementary and secondary education;
+
the emphasis on efficiency and rationalization in
industry;
+
the prevalence of quasi-military styles in corporate
and educational ceremonies;
+
the continuity in organizational forms between the
wartime umbrella labor organization (Sanpô) and
post-surrender enterprise unions;
+
the prevalence of payment schemes for both blue- and white-collar workers that
stress life cycle needs rather than output in wage determination;
+
the position of small business (the old middle class)
as subcontractors to large industrial groups;
+
the prevalence of operating entities ( eidan ) combining public and private functions;
+
the linkage of the public and private sectors through
directors chosen from former bureaucrats ( amakudari
);
+
the use of "administrative guidance" rather
than codified rules and procedures;
+
the role of wartime technocrats, especially those with
Manchurian experience, in postwar planning;
+
the creation in the armaments industry of a large pool of scientific,
engineering, and skilled blue-collar labor that was freed by defeat for postwar
civilian industry;
+
SCAP (Occupation) policies for "democratization" that echoed those of
1930s-1940s Japanese militarists;
+
the wartime rhetoric of the folk , the denial of class divisions, the emphasis
on the Japanese as "unique," the emphasis on corporatist ( kyôdôteki ) forms for analysis, etc. in
the contemporary Japanese self image (as in
Nihonjinron and Nihon bunkaron ).
The
conclusion will focus not just on the direct historical points raised by this
study but also on the issue of why historians in general and Japanese historians
in particular have largely ignored the "middle classes."
Revised 2016-08-12