Seinendan: Youth Associations As Social Technology in Late Meiji and Taishō Japan

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Seinendan: Youth Associations As Social Technology in Late Meiji and Taishō Japan Seinendan: Youth Associations as Social Technology in Late Meiji and Taishō Japan by Alexander Schweinsberg A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Alexander Schweinsberg 2014 Seinendan: Youth Associations as Social Technology in Late Meiji and Taishō Japan Alexander Schweinsberg Master of Arts Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto 2014 Abstract This thesis is an investigation into the rise of the rural youth association (seinendan) movement in Japan, focusing on the period from around 1890 to the first years of World War I. Treatment is also given to genealogical connections and differences between these associations and earlier rural social groupings, which the Greater Japan Federation of Youth Associations (est. 1925) narrativized as its historical antecedents and a primordial expression of Japanese national essence. Modern seinendan provided new opportunities for local notables and the state to deal with problems of governance and promoting rural reform. Using primary sources, extended attention is given to how elite bureaucrats conceived of self-governance as an organizational paradigm for administrative units and, eventually, individuals. Lastly, the origins and instrumentalization in Japan of the concept of youth as a stage distinct from childhood are discussed in transnational context, with particular focus on the rise of youth psychology. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Takashi Fujitani, for taking me on as a student, his always insightful advice and comments, timely assistance in what were for me trying personal circumstances, and, above all, for being a model of careful and impactful scholarship that illuminates both past and present. I also thank the outstanding faculty of the Departments of East Asian Studies and History at the University of Toronto, who made my education (undergraduate and grauate) so rewarding both intellectually and personally, in particular Professors Ken C. Kawashima, Thomas Keirstead, Michelle Murphy, Janet Poole, and Andre Schmid. Special thanks are due to Ikuko Komuro-Lee and the other teachers of Japanese language at U of T from 2004-2008, whose kind assistance and second-to-none undergraduate instruction in Japanese language allowed me to spend four fun and transformative years in Japan. Having the chance to return to Toronto to teach Japanese under Komuro-sensei’s guidance not only made my graduate studies possible but also allowed me to attempt, however insufficiently, ongaeshi and to have that uniquely nostalgic experience of coming full circle in standing at the front of the classroom where I began my own journey. Thanks also to the Nobjects for taking on an outsider and opening my horizons to the world of science and technology studies; and to the Grey Lounge Crew for many hours of sharp scholarly exchange, good conversation, and much- needed laughter (and for cleaning up my messes). Finally I thank my family and Rachel for their love and support without which none of this would have been possible. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ........................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ......................................................................................................................................1 Chapter One – An Ambivalent Past ...............................................................................................10 Chapter Two – The Encounter with the Modern State ..................................................................37 Chapter Three – Local Improvement and Self-Governance ..........................................................77 Chapter Four – Youth ..................................................................................................................110 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................142 Endnotes .......................................................................................................................................150 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................158 iv Introduction This thesis is an investigation into the rise of the rural youth association (seinendan) movement in Japan, focusing on the period from around 1890 to the first years of World War I. However much one might hope to avoid an overly teleological narrative, this history must be articulated in relation to the establishment in 1925 of the Dai Nippon Rengō Seinendan (which presented itself in English as the “Federation of Young Men’s Leagues of Japan;” hereafter DNRS) as the umbrella organization for all youth associations in the country. By 1937, it sat atop a state- established pyramid of regional and district federations, the base of which comprised “more than 18,000 young men’s leagues in Japan proper alone, whose members are estimated at above 2,700,000 in all.”1 Based on the census of 1930, which gave a total figure of more than 6,800,000, this was approximately forty percent of Japan’s population of young men (ages 14- 24). Nonetheless, DNRS claimed that it was “not meant to merely amalgamate the [individual leagues] into bigger bodies;”2 rather, its aim was “to facilitate mutual communication and to promote cooperation among the young men’s leagues throughout the country and thus strive for the attainment of their common progress and development.”3 It promoted cultural edification, healthy physical growth, and moral and technical training of young men and pushed its vision and ideals for youth through a variety of pamphlets and newspapers intended for its membership as well for overseas audiences. Of course, by 1937 the DNRS was essentially a paramilitary organization. It operated within a militaristic and nationalistic ethos, often in close association with the Imperial Reservists’ Association (teikoku zaigō gunjinkai). If the seinendan are mentioned in English- language scholarship, it is usually in this capacity. Richard J. Smethurst’s A Social Basis for Prewar Japanese Militarism is the only monograph-length treatment of this subject in English, and 1 2 has thus naturally come to inform other works that treat the seinendan tangentially.a This is somewhat limiting, for Smethurst’s purpose was to explain “why rural Japan’s loyalty never wavered” before and during World War II.4 Essentially: [t]he Japanese army was able to guide its nation’s destinies in the wartime era because it molded an obedient rural following before the crisis decade of the 1930s and continued to solidify what one observer called its ‘electoral constituency’ thereafter. They established branches and subbranches of their organizations [youth and reservist associations, women’s defense leagues, etc.] in every agricultural village…and used long-standing internal social stratification, cooperation, cohesiveness, and sanctions against nonconformity for army purposes. In other words, the army leaders did not search for new methods to build their rural support; they looked to village conventions instead….Each local branch became a microcosm of the hamlet and village as a whole…. In other words, the army’s success at building rural support was based on its use of each villager’s parochial commitment to the hamlet’s social order and to the hamlet itself as the center of his world.5 Smethurst’s focus on the army is justified, and I would not like to minimize the cunning with which the army sought to weave itself into the fabric of local life. Moreover, he highlights the army’s sensitivity to local conditions and variations and its realization that a successful organization would have to be founded on the strength of parochial bonds, a point which I too develop in Chapter Three, though from the perspective of Education and Home Ministry bureaucrats rather than the army. However, arguing that the army forged a network of support for militarism by co-opting the “cohesive organic society” of the village, relies not just on a rather stereotyped picture of rural society, but also on the tired argument that “submissiveness to authoritarian leadership” and a “willingness to subordinate the individual to the group” underlay the development of Japanese fascism.b This emphasis on the role of the army and state—the narrative of instrumentalization and a See, for instance, Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Andrew Gordon, A Modern history of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). b Smethurst, A Social Basis, 179-184. See also R. P. Dore and Tsutomu Ouchi, "Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism," in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James William Morley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 181-209. This discourse still carries weight in popular understandings of WWII and still circulates within academia: “[T]he crucial issue is… the ideology that made for the fanatical loyalty of the Japanese people to their emperor, unshaken even after the dropping of two atomic bombs and the destruction of the Meiji state. Few men in history have commanded
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