Capital-Nation-State: a Genealogy of Yasukuni Shrine

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Capital-Nation-State: A Genealogy of Yasukuni Shrine

Joshua P. Baxter

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

Capital-Nation-State: A Genealogy of Yasukuni Shrine

Joshua P. Baxter

Doctorate of Philosophy

Department of East Asian Studies University of Toronto

November 2016 Abstract

Japan’s militaristic past continues to haunt the present and often at the center of these debates is the site that commemorates the war dead, Yasukuni Shrine. This dissertation seeks to address the political economy of the shrine and argues that this issue cannot be transcended if the history of the development of capitalism in Japan continues to be bracketed off in favor of narrating the shrine strictly through the discourse of the nation and the state. This claim derives from the observation that Yasukuni Shrine and the development of capitalism in Japan emerge at the same historical moment and thus they must also share an underlying logic. By adding capital to the equation, it becomes evident that the shrine is at the nexus of the operation of Capital-

Nation-State and thus played a role in producing the very idea of modern Japan.

Using a variety of primary sources, from state documents to personal diaries and newspaper reports, the archival research reveals how the shrine, as a state institution, was shaped by economic interactions just as much as it was by state ideology. In each chapter a different aspect of how the history of capitalism intersects with the space of the shrine is examined through the themes of everyday life, commodity exchange, urban planning, and universal conscription. Key to all of these themes is the relation of political economy to space. Whether it was facilitating commodity exchange on the shrine grounds or making land transactions,

Yasukuni Shrine was an active agent in shaping not only the immediate space around it, but also in forming a national space. By examining the political economy of Yasukuni, it becomes evident that the shrine played an important role in propagating various types of exchanges

(whether economic, religious or political) that were essential to forming this space. Thus, the results of this project show that Yasukuni was more than just a state institution that fostered the creation of national subjects; it was a space that brought together the three social forms, Capital-

Nation-State, which characterizes and dominates our current socio-political landscape.

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Acknowledgments

This project would not have been completed without the support and encouragement that I received from many people. First I would like to thank my supervisor, Ken Kawashima, who introduced me to political economy and taught me how to think critically as a historian. Without his direction and insights into Japanese history this project would not have taken the form it did. To Eric Cazdyn I owe a certain intellectual rigour that has inspired not only my own academic research but also my approach to politics and life. Through his writing and teaching I learned the importance of engaging the ‘impossible’ by pushing the limits and boundaries of thought; and to do so with a passion. To my other committee members, Yiching Wu, Kanishka Goonewardena and Katsuya Hirano, I express my gratitude for your insightful comments and for your generosity in seeing the potential for where this project might lead.

I want to acknowledge the professors who influenced and encouraged me during my graduate career at the University of Toronto either through courses or through intellectual conversations: Rick Guisso, Tom Kierstead, Ikuko Komuro-Lee, Tong Lam, Ruth Marshall, Yue Meng, Janet Poole, Fabiano Rocha, Graham Sanders, Andre Schmid, and Lisa Yoneyama. During this time I also learned a lot through academic discussions as well as life lessons from many graduate students to whom I am thankful I was able to share time with—Martin Bastarache, Olga Fedorenko, Christina Han, Na Sil Heo, Jeremy Hurdis, Young Oh Jung, Banu Kaygusuz, Sunho Ko, Derek Kramer, Minna Lee, Mark McConaghy, Edwin Michielson, James Poborsa, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Alex Schweinsberg, Kristin Sivak, Joelle Tapas, Michael Tseng, Jing Wang, and Yuanfang Zhang.

While in Japan I received lots of support, encouragement, home-cooked meals and occasionally a place to sleep from many friends. Specifically I would like to thank Steven Bohme, Brian Durrant, Shinobu and Takeki Hirai, Andrew Innes, Nana Ishida, Jeff Liu, and Stuart Metcalf. I want to thank the extended Teshigahara family (Susumu, Kikuyo, Mitsuya, Fusako, Kazuto, Sōta, Shū, Hisashi, Misato, Sara, Kaede, Mayumi and Yuzu) for their continuous support and for welcoming me into their family. I should also thank Matsumoto Takenori at the University of Tokyo for taking me in as a research student and the members of his Nōgyōshi seminar (in

iv particular Tanai Hitoshi and Kohama Takeshi) for their intellectual support and interest in my research. Katō Yōkō was gracious enough to allow me to attend her graduate seminar despite my limited knowledge on the topic.

Finally, I’d like to thank my family for their support and encouragement throughout my academic studies.

Funding for this project was generously given by the Japan Foundation Doctoral Fellowship, the Dr. David Chu Scholarship in Asia Pacific Studies and the University of Toronto School of Graduate Studies.

Notes

For Japanese names I have followed the convention of placing family names first, except in cases where the Japanese author publishes outside of Japan and in languages other than Japanese. All translations of Japanese texts, unless otherwise noted, are my own. Up until December 31, 1872, all dates are in accordance with the lunar calendar.

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments...... iv

Notes ...... vi

Table of Contents ...... vii

List of Tables ...... ix

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1 From Kyoto to Tokyo: The Production of Space and the Everyday ...... 24

1.1 The Everyday and the Production of Space ...... 30

1.2 From Kyoto to Tokyo as Spatial Practice ...... 34

1.3 From Kyoto to Tokyo as Representations of Space...... 45

1.4 Spaces of Representation and Everyday Life at the Shrine ...... 59

Chapter 2 Festival, Exchange, and the Political Economy of Yasukuni Shrine ...... 74

2.1 From the Kaichō to the Annual Grand Festivals (Reitaisai)...... 80

2.2 Tokyo’s Acropolis ...... 90

2.3 Nagano Uheiji’s Yasukuni ...... 94

2.4 Fusing Capital-Nation-State...... 100

2.4.1 Mode of Exchange A: The Nation ...... 101

2.4.2 Mode of Exchange B: The State ...... 105

2.4.3 Mode of Exchange C: Capital ...... 109

Chapter 3 Grounding Yasukuni ...... 119

3.1 Transferring the Capital (Sento) Debate ...... 124

3.2 The Samurai Estate Issue (Bukechi Shori Mondai) ...... 129

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3.3 The Space of Kudan Hill...... 132

3.4 Land Tax Reform of 1873...... 135

3.5 The Land Reforms and Tokyo ...... 140

3.6 Making Landowners into Capitalists ...... 142

3.7 Yasukuni Shrine and Finance Capital ...... 151

3.8 Urban Planning and Fictitious Capital ...... 156

Chapter 4 Soldiers, Surplus Populations and the Nation ...... 175

4.1 E. H. Norman and the Figure of the Peasant Soldier ...... 182

4.2 Universal Conscription, Primitive Accumulation, and the Nation ...... 191

4.3 Japan’s Conscription System in the Meiji Period ...... 204

4.4 The Figure of the Soldier and Yasukuni ...... 215

Epilogue: What Does Yasukuni Shrine Commemorate? ...... 219

Bibliography ...... 225

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List of Tables

Table 1: Monetary Offerings at Yasukuni Shrine from 1891-1910 (yen) 104

Table 2: Special Votive Offerings from the Imperial Family in the Meiji Period 107

Table 3: 1874 Kaichō at Honjo Ekōin 113

Table 4: Distribution of Public Bonds to the Daimyo, Court Nobility (kuge)

and Samurai after 1876 148

Table 5: Amount of Public Bonds Individually Received by Nobility (kazoku)

in 1876 149

Table 6: Amount of Investments to the 15th National Bank by Individual Investors 149

Table 7: Largest landholding entities at the end of the Meiji Period 158

Table 8: Land Values and Absentee Landlord Rates in Fujimicho and

Iidamachi during the Meiji period 171

Table 9: Active Service Army Personnel from 1871-1890 210

Table 10: Revisions in the Length of Military Service in the Army 212

List of Figures

Figure 1: The Yasukuni Shrine grounds, from Kenchiku Zasshi, October, 1907 95

Figure 2: Nagano’s blueprint for Yasukuni Shrine, from Kenchiku Zasshi,

October 1907 97

Figure 3: Land Value and Size of Yasukuni Shrine as calculated in 1878 157

Figure 4: 1878 Survey of Land Value and Plot Size in Fujimicho District 2 168

Introduction

The first time I visited Yasukuni Shrine was in January 2005, a day after arriving in

Tokyo on a trans-pacific flight. With only one day in the city and a number of tourist sites that I wanted to see, my visit to the shrine was sandwiched between stops in Asakusa, Ginza and

Akihabara. The shrine grounds were still bustling with large crowds of people making their annual first visit of the year (hatsumode) with people seemingly in a good mood. I remember thinking at the time, why was this space constantly in the news as being so controversial?

Certainly on this early day in January, there were no signs of protests or controversy among those present.

It was with this first experience at the shrine that my interest in Yasukuni Shrine began and has continued to be a topic of interest that has consumed my thought for over a decade now.

At the time, the problems surrounding the shrine were affectionately called the Koizumi Mondai

(Koizumi Issue) pointing to the influence that the then Prime Minister of Japan, Koizumi

Jun’ichirō, had in bringing this controversial space to the forefront of international and domestic politics in the early 2000s. This photogenic and charismatic Liberal Democratic Party member, who infamously danced with actor Richard Gere and had a cult following of female admirers around the country, had made a campaign promise to attend the annual August 15th ceremony at

Yasukuni that commemorated the end of the Pacific War. The caveat was that he would do so in his official capacity as the Prime Minister, which drew criticism from Japan’s neighbours, specifically China and Korea, as well as reigniting a domestic debate over the legality of such a

1 2 visit given the 1947 Constitution’s separation of church and state. The main point of contention for many was that Yasukuni Shrine was where those who were deemed war criminals were being remembered and maybe even revered for their past actions. The enshrinement of 14-Class A war criminals in 1978 became the focal point of what is now referred to as the Yasukuni Mondai

(Yasukuni Issue) debate.1

The ‘Yasukuni Issue’ itself is difficult to define as it covers a wide range of political, historical, constitutional, diplomatic, and religious problems that have become associated with the shrine.2 To list a few: the attempt by politicians to bring the shrine back under the funding and protection of the state;3 the history textbook issue where the government is accused of whitewashing the past by downplaying Japan’s invasion of the continent; the question of the legality of the Prime Minister’s visits (as an official or private citizen) to the shrine due to the constitutional separation of the church and state; the apology issue where the multiple statements made by Japanese politicians to show remorse for wartime actions are considered to be insincere; the question of whether Yasukuni allows for the persistence of wartime ideals and latent nationalism; the issue of religious freedom and its protection under the constitution for both

Shinto supporters and non-Shinto followers who are enshrined at Yasukuni;4 and, the strained

1 The Class A war criminals were enshrined in 1978, however, this was not made public until April of the following year. 2 For an introduction to some of these problems by various authors in English, see John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 3 See Cyril Powles, “Yasukuni Jinja Hōan: Religion and Politics in Contemporary Japan,” Pacific Affairs 49, No. 3 (Autumn, 1976): 491-505. 4 Norma Field documents one such example of a Christian woman, Mrs. Nakaya, who filed a lawsuit in 1973 against the state to demand that her husband, a member of the Japanese Self-Defense Force, not be enshrined at Yasukuni or any other of the similar shrines around the country. Mrs. Nakaya’s charge was that this violated her constitutional right to freedom of religion. See Norma Field, In the Realm of a Dying Emperor: Japan at Century’s End (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 107-174.

3 diplomatic relations that the shrine represents in dealing with Japan’s neighbours, in particular,

China and Korea. Discussions around these various issues tend to be very polemical which often makes these particular debates dead-ends in terms of finding some type of resolution to the

Yasukuni Mondai. While all of these issues historically emerged at various moments, it is generally accepted that the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ hinges on the enshrinement of the Class A war criminals and was exasperated by Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro’s visit to the shrine on

August 15, 1985. Despite full knowledge of the international and political fallout that followed

Nakasone’s visit, Prime Minister Koizumi was adamant about keeping his campaign promise to do the same.

While the media speculated whether or not Koizumi would fulfill his promise in 2005, his second landslide election victory in September of that year proved that his political position on Yasukuni Shrine had little effect on his popularity. In fact, every year that Koizumi was in office, he visited the shrine but he purposely avoided attending on August 15th despite his campaign promise to do so.5 In an official government press release following Koizumi’s visit to the shrine less than a month after the election, it stated that visits to the shrine were meant to assure “peace and prosperity” for the nation. The 2005 election victory was meant to signify a turning point for Japan and its emergence out of the low-growth 1990s—the “lost decade”—with a green light to institute the next round of neoliberal policies to be put into effect across the country. Koizumi’s neoliberal austerity measures of cutting government programs, financial deregulation, and privatizing public companies like Japan Post garnered much more media attention than the Yasukuni issue up to this point. Nonetheless, it was within this euphoria of

5 He attended Yasukuni Shrine on August 13, 2001; April 24, 2002; January 14, 2003; January 1, 2004; and October 17, 2005.

4 slashing budgets and cutting public employees that Koizumi decided to attend the ceremony marking the end of the Pacific War at Yasukuni Shrine in the summer of 2006 and with it the war on the recession for the prosperity of the nation became visibly entangled with the space of

Yasukuni Shrine.6

It is the overlapping of the space of the shrine with other social problems that will serve as an overall framework for this project. The immediate space of the shrine grounds although enclosed by defined boundaries is not immune or cut off from its surroundings. In fact, it often bleeds into other spaces, whether physical spaces such as the city around it or the space of thought, just as other social problems such as race, gender, class, or the memory of the past also bleed into the space of the shrine. To borrow a phrase from Eric Cazdyn, Yasukuni ‘exceeds itself’.7 It cannot be contained by the boundaries of the shrine grounds and thus any study of the shrine must also look beyond this space in order to understand not only why Yasukuni matters but also how it intersects and overlaps with other social problems. Thus, this project is organized and driven by a desire to push the limits and boundaries of how we think about Yasukuni

Shrine.8

6 It should be noted that Prime Minister Nakasone’s infamous visit to Yasukuni Shrine in 1985 was also amid a volley of privatization. Just months before his visit to the shrine the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (NTT) as well as the Japan Tobacco and Salt Public Corporation (JTS) were privatized and in January of that year Nakasone declared his intention to privatize Japan National Railway which was carried out two years later. 7 Eric Cazdyn uses this phrase to describe film as medium but also the nation-state itself in Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 8 This was the challenge presented to me by my supervisor Professor Ken Kawashima when I first proposed writing a dissertation on the ‘Yasukuni Issue’. It seemed that the debate over Yasukuni Shrine was at a dead-end in terms of finding a productive way to approach this problem without simply falling into one of the two camps which either supported the Japanese Government’s position or was against it.

More specifically, this dissertation will address the excesses of Yasukuni Shrine by pushing the boundaries of thought beyond the usual discussions of nationalism or militarism that dominate the contemporary discourse of the shrine by integrating another mode of critique: the shrine’s political economy. The argument presented here is that we cannot overcome the

‘Yasukuni Issue’ if we continue to bracket off the history of the development of capitalism in

Japan in favor of narrating the history of the shrine strictly through the discourse of the nation and the state. This approach is grounded in the observation that the shrine and capitalism in

Japan emerge at the same historical moment and thus they must also share an underlying logic.

While this may seem to be a rather simple proposition, the scholarship on Yasukuni Shrine has generally ignored connecting the shrine to the economic aims of the Meiji state which lead to

Japanese imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By adding capital to the equation, it becomes evident that the shrine is at the nexus of the operation of what Hegel saw as the ultimate social form ‘Capital-Nation-State’ and thus it played a role in producing the very idea of modern Japan. I believe that including a critique of capital alongside the already existent scholarship that attacks the shrine as a source of latent desires regarding nationalism and state militarism can help clarify what is really at stake in critiquing Yasukuni and the type of politics necessary to confront this issue.

The Space of Exchange

Originally my research aspired to respond to the challenge presented by the Japanese philosopher Takahashi Tetsuya regarding the historiographical problems that are apparent in the discourse of the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ debate. As was mentioned above, the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ is generally considered to be a product of the enshrinement of 14 Class A war criminals—who

6 were enshrined there in 1978—which automatically connects this discourse to the International

Military Tribunal for the Far East (more commonly known as the Tokyo Tribunal). While it is the legitimacy of the tribunal that is generally the topic of contention, Takahashi argues that the real problem regarding the Tokyo Tribunal is with the historical limitations of the trials in terms of how it periodized the past. From the outset, the tribunal was only interested in sentencing war crimes that occurred leading up to the Manchurian Incident, so from 1928 until Japan’s surrender in 1945. With this periodizing of Japanese imperialism in Asia what became obvious was the glossing over of Japan’s colonial and early imperial history prior to 1928. Takahashi argues that this is largely because the judges on the Tribunal were colonial powers themselves and that to indict Japan for its colonial activities would also be an indictment of their own actions.9 With this in mind I intended to write a history of Yasukuni Shrine that sought to overcome this limit by focussing on how the shrine might have already been problematic from its inception in 1869.

However, as my project began to unfold, it became increasingly clear that the history that I was writing was not one based on a problem of periodization but rather on the problem of space.

The spatial turn throughout academic disciplines in the 1970s and 80s sought to give some life to an undertheorized and often forgotten aspect of history itself: space. As the analogy goes, historians simply saw space as the stage on which actors played out the story line (and nobody interested in theater would ever attend just to stare at the stage). Thus space was treated as the background to the movement of time, empty and immobile.10 It was the French

9 Takahashi Tetsuya, “Legacies of Empire: The Yasukuni Shrine Controversy” in Yasukuni, the War Dead, and the Struggle for Japan’s Past, edited by John Breen and translated by Dr. Nicola Liscutin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 114. 10 In comparing the primacy of time over space (history over geography) within academic discourse, Foucault stated that “space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time, on the contrary, was richness,

7 philosopher Henri Lefebvre that first situated the problem of space within a critical social theory in the 1960s.11 At the center of Lefebvre’s approach was the realization that space was not just an empty background but rather was something that was organized and given meaning through a political process.12 By recognizing that space was socially constructed, it led him to interrogate dominant social structures that had an impact on how space was produced. The result was an elaborate exploration of how capitalism informed the production of space and then how spatial relations facilitated the process of the “reproduction of relations of production.”13

Despite having formed his critique from a Marxist position, Lefebvre’s work goes beyond simply arguing for the inclusion of a spatial analysis within Marxism. Through his writing, he strongly suggests that space has its own social forming power in that it could modify social relations.14 While this argument has been widely critiqued by Marxists, the American geographer Edward Soja took up this idea calling it the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’. According to

fecundity, life, dialectic.” From “Questions of Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings 1972-1977, edited by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 70. 11 Arguably Lefebvre first broached the topic of social space in his Critique of Everyday Life (1947) but it was not until The Right to the City (1968) and The Urban Revolution (1970) that Lefebvre turned to the urban question which dominated his thought and practice until his death in 1991. 12 In Lefebvre’s own words: “If space has an air of neutrality and indifference with regard to its contents and thus seems to be ‘purely’ formal, the epitome of rational abstraction, it is because it has already been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident in the land-scape. Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies.” From “Reflections on the Politics of Space,” translated by Michael J. Enders, Antipode Vol. 8, No. 2 (1976), 31. 13 Henri Lefebvre, “Introduction,” in Writings on Cities, translated by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Cambridge, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 187. 14 It was this line of arguing that led to Lefebvre’s alienation from other Marxists since it challenged the base- superstructure model that had come to define Marxist politics centered on the mode of production. Lefebvre’s suggestion that space could also influence social relations essentially re-spatialized Marxist politics by moving the space of politics from the factory to the city.

Soja, the socio-spatial dialectic is built on the premise that “social and spatial relations are dialectically inter-reactive, interdependent; that social relations of production are both space- forming and space-contingent.”15 Lefebvre’s approach to space thus had tremendous implications for Marxist theory in that he believed, if the space of the city could be reconfigured so that it did not reproduce the relations of production then an urban revolution could be brought forth that would challenge the hegemony of capitalism.

Perhaps the most sympathetic Marxist response to Lefebvre’s position was formulated by

David Harvey. In the late 1960s, Harvey had just completed his PhD in Geography at the

University of Cambridge and moved to Baltimore for a job at John Hopkins University. It was there that he began to read Marx with an interest in understanding the relation between spatial forms and spatial processes. The result was his 1973 classic Social Justice and the City which reintroduced the city to a Marxist critique as well as defining the spatial dimension of Marx’s theorization of capital. His work was in many ways an off-shoot from Lefebvre’s thought on social space but Harvey refused to recognize urbanization as a historical force as Lefebvre did.

Instead Harvey followed a much more orthodox Marxist position in seeing urbanization as a product of industrialization and social space as a reflection of the mode of production. Still

Harvey agreed with Lefebvre on the need to politicize the space of the city since it is urban space that holds the potential for revolutionary activity.16

Both Lefebvre and Harvey have written extensively on their given topics and theorization of space just as they have both been the subject of many studies and critiques. Their imprint on

15 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989), 81. 16 David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (New York: Verso, 2013), xiii.

9 this project is obvious as I also approach the production of space using a critique of political economy and the everyday to think about how a politics of space can open and close the possibilities of how we think about the present and the future. However, my departure or point of intervention in their work is to incorporate the thought of the Japanese philosopher Karatani

Kōjin by introducing his concept of modes of exchange and to postulate that they also contain a necessary spatial component.

Karatani’s rethinking of historical materialism based on modes of exchange as opposed to modes of production is in many ways driven by the failures of twentieth-century communism to deal with the ideological structures of the state and the nation. While Marxists had held that these structures would simply wither away once capital was transcended, history proved that they were fused and interwoven with capital which led Karatani to portray the trinity of Capital-Nation-

State as a Borromean knot in which it is impossible to simply remove one ring from the others.

Thus Capital-Nation-State needs to be thought of as being composed of autonomous parts each having their own base founded in their own mode of exchange rather than posing the nation and state as part of capital’s ideological superstructure.17 It is important to note that Karatani’s approach to exchange is to discern transitions in which a new mode of exchange becomes dominant over the previous mode. However, this does not mean that previous modes of exchange disappear. Instead, they continue to persist which is how we have arrived at the trinity of Capital-

Nation-State as a social formation. Exchange as a mode of critique seeks to not only present a new structure of world history but also a new space of politics grounded on the contingency of exchange itself.

17 Karatani points out that even the economic base has its own superstructure based on the theory of value.

The first mode of exchange that Karatani discusses is reciprocity. He claims that this mode of exchange emerges out of clan society and in principle is used “for forming larger, stratified communities” through the obligatory giving of gifts.18 Since reciprocity is used to build community, Karatani associates this mode of exchange with the nation as it also incorporates reciprocity in forming a national community. That this mode of exchange is used to form a larger community is important since it denotes that the exchange must take place between two communities and not simply within one household. The second mode of exchange is that of the state. The state mode of exchange has two components: plunder and redistribution. While obtaining material resources for subsistence might be the aim of all communities, the perpetual plundering of other communities only results in permanent war. Thus Karatani argues that the act of redistribution created the conditions for a dominant community “to be able to plunder continuously.”19 For the state, this meant not only protecting the other community from other potential plunderers but also that it had to issue public policies that would benefit the larger community. The final historical mode of exchange that Karatani discusses is commodity exchange. As opposed to the first two modes, Karatani locates the basis of commodity exchange within the “free association of individuals.”20 However, he notes that, just because these two individuals come to the process of exchange as free individuals, it does not mean that their

18 Karatani Kōjin, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange, translated by Michael K. Bourdaghs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 5. 19 Karatani makes a distinction between his notion of redistribution with that of Karl Polanyi in that he posits that plunder occurs before redistribution thus pointing to the absolute power of the state as opposed to redistribution as a form of reciprocity. Ibid., 6. 20 Ibid., 6.

11 positions are equal.21 It is this spatial difference that I want to incorporate into a discussion of the production of space via Lefebvre and Harvey.

The common spatial relation with all these modes of exchange is that they occur between the interstices of communities. This space between communities is where the process of exchange historically emerges and is eventually what gives birth to the commodity form.22

Throughout his work, Karatani charts the various spatial relations that each mode of exchange produced but he does so temporally.23 This by no means detracts from his project and should not be a surprise as his aim is to produce a structure of world history. What I will attempt to do in this dissertation is locate how each mode of exchange also produces particular spaces within a capitalist landscape. By tracing how these spaces are dependent on the dominant mode of exchange (commodity exchange), I point to the problem of producing a politics that neglects the relation between capitalism and space.

Karatani’s formulation of modes of exchange shares many common intellectual endeavors with the work of Henri Lefebvre. For one, both scholars give priority to the realm of exchange over the space of production as a way to escape the narrow politics of orthodox

21 Following Marx, Karatani points to the asymmetrical relationship between the buyer and seller within the commodity mode of exchange. Here the social power of money asserts itself as it can buy anything, anytime it wants, whereas the holder of a commodity must wait until an exchange can be made. This asymmetry becomes particularly pertinent with the labour market as the owner of labour power must wait for an exchange which gives a hierarchical position to the holder of money. For more on this topic, see Karatani Kōjin, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, translated by Sabu Kohso (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 200-201.

22 Marx writes: “The exchange of commodities begins where communities have their boundaries, at their points of contact with other communities, or with members of the latter. However, as soon as products have become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become commodities in the internal life of the community… the constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social process. In the course of time, therefore, at least some part of the products must be produced intentionally for the purpose of exchange.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 182. 23 For example, he traces how clan societies formed mini-systems which turned into a world-empire once the state mode of exchange emerged and, finally, with commodity exchange a world-economy evolves.

Marxism that can only see history through modes of production. For Lefebvre, this meant exploring the topic of alienation as something that also occurs outside of the factory within our leisure time and experience of everyday life. Karatani, by focussing on the moment of exchange as a vulnerable point in the circulation of capital, also concludes that Marxism needs to move beyond modes of production and place more emphasis on a politics of consumption.24 A second mutual aim is the breakdown of the base-superstructure model of historical materialism but to still hold onto the idea of the economic base as having an integral role in forming class relations.

Lefebvre challenges the base-superstructure model by arguing that the formation of space has an impact on social relations while Karatani attacks this model by looking at how the nation and state have their own base through their own mode of exchange. Finally, both Lefebvre and

Karatani locate the space of revolution outside of the factory either in urban space or in the act of exchange itself.

While Karatani can lend Lefebvre some intellectual standing by offering a rigorous structure from which a departure from historical materialism can be fostered, I think that

Lefebvre can also help Karatani by thinking about the spatial component of his modes of exchange. What is the space of exchange? How do different modes of exchange produce certain spaces within a capitalist landscape? It is this spatial aspect of exchange that I will use along with Lefebvre and Harvey to understand how Yasukuni Shrine as a socially constructed space was perceived, conceived and experienced by people in Meiji Japan. Thus, I aim to trace how the three modes of exchange of Capital-Nation-State came together in the space of Yasukuni Shrine in which each type of exchange was integral to its production. This tracing is important because,

24 To this end Karatani, was a supporter of the Local Exchange Trading System (LETS) movement in the 1980s and 90s as well as the founder of the New Associationist Movement (NAM) in 2000 which sought to institute an anti- capitalist/state form of production and consumption.

13 as Karatani states, “if we wish to transcend Capital-Nation-State, we must first be able to see it” and scholarship up to this point has not made the links between this trinity entirely clear.25

The Genealogical Cut

As the dissertation title suggests, this project argues for a genealogical approach to

Yasukuni Shrine. By this I do not mean a search for origins or beginnings in which a more innocent or purer image of the shrine can be historically produced. The genealogical cut is performed at the level of historical narrative which often serves to prop up the most powerful members of society as well as the prevailing logic of the present moment. Conventional historical narratives generate stories of the past that posit continuity with the present in a way that organizes the past into neat linear histories. While history is always a project that involves acts of remembering and forgetting, the dangers of letting historical narratives become fixated is that they deprive the present of possibilities; of imagining a different present or even the possibilities of the future which in turn shut down and limit the space of politics. Thus, the genealogical cut, to use the words of Foucault, “rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies.”26 In regards to Yasukuni this approach can radically shift how we think about the shrine and the possibilities of producing a politics that might overcome the stalemate of the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ debate.

25 Karatani, 1. 26 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 140.

The current scholarship of the shrine in large part produces a traditional history that links the concerns of the present (that are encompassed by the ‘Yasukuni Issue’) with moments of the past that align with this discourse. Since the contemporary debate revolves around the enshrinement of war criminals, the constitutional division of church and state, eruptions of state nationalism or militarism, or the issue of religious freedom then it should come as no surprise that the history of Yasukuni Shrine is often written with these issues in mind. Thus, the scholarship on the shrine repeats familiar arguments and narratives generally associated with the

‘Yasukuni trinity’: the emperor, State Shinto and the military (war dead). Although the approach that I utilize in this project will seem somewhat dismissive of this body of knowledge, it is also what constitutes the possibility of imaging such a departure. The genealogical history that I propose is to cut Yasukuni off from these discourses that produce a teleological narrative that links the history of the shrine directly to the postwar ‘Yasukuni Issue’. In other words, I want to short-circuit the contemporary debate over the shrine with the aim of opening up a new space through which the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ can be rethought. There are two ways in which I attempt to accomplish this task: first, by limiting the historical scope of my research to the Meiji period

(1868-1912); and, second, by resisting a narrative of the shrine strictly through the theme of war.

The discourse of the postwar ‘Yasukuni Issue’ in many ways does not resonate with the early history of the shrine. Although this is in part due to the constitutional changes made in the immediate postwar period, there are also discrepancies between the state’s narrative of the shrine and how people experienced and thought of that space during the Meiji period. This gap will be taken up in the first chapter as I suggest that Yasukuni Shrine was a contested space at a time when state power was still attempting to assert itself not only within the new capital of Tokyo but at a national level. By focussing strictly on the Meiji period, I hope to produce an image of the shrine as it might have been experienced through the everyday without the historical baggage

15 of the subsequent international wars that had yet to make their mark on the space of the shrine grounds. This leads into my second method of cutting knowledge which is to disavow a reading of the shrine strictly through the narrative of war.27

Yasukuni Shrine is synonymous with images, stories and symbols of war. As a site that memorializes those who gave their lives for the emperor and nation this should come as no surprise. Naturally, this aspect of the shrine has been thoroughly researched and analysed in fields such as history, religion, politics, and memory studies. Yet, despite all of this scholarly attention focussing on the theme of war, it often fails to disrupt dominant narratives as it tends to reproduce what we already know. We know how the shrine fits into the logic of the nation-state and its relation to the emperor just as we are aware that there is also a personal dimension to these deaths and that simply ignoring this aspect also has negative psychological implications.

These are important discussions to have and they can be politically mobilized to give a voice to historical subjects that have been otherwise silenced. Nonetheless, the emphasis on war also acts to conceal or shut down other ways in which Yasukuni Shrine imputes meaning to the space and people around it. As was mentioned above, the shrine exceeds itself and cannot be contained by spatial or narrative boundaries. Thus this project will explore avenues in which Yasukuni Shrine played a role in producing space and subjects through topics such as entertainment and land markets. The only foray into the discourse of war will be made in the final chapter, which looks at universal conscription and the figure of the soldier. However, even this discussion will be

27 Foucault states that an effective history asserts that knowledge is made for cutting and that the past should be written so that it “introduces discontinuity into our very being—as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself…it deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature.” Ibid., 154.

16 somewhat detached from war itself as it looks at universal conscription through the historical production of surplus populations.

Although I utilize the genealogical cut as a methodology, I believe this can still be done without betraying a political project. The politics presented in this scholarship revolves around the trinity of Capital-Nation-State and the implications this social formation has in not only shaping the production of space but also our very subjectivity. The archival research will focus on the optics of being able to perceive how Capital-Nation-State operates with the aim of interrupting the current discourse regarding Yasukuni Shrine in order to produce a politics that works towards the transcendence of this structure. As Karatani argues, this trinity is “joined together in a mutually supplementary manner” not unlike the Borromean knot.28 In this sense, this project hopes to find allies with other scholars of Yasukuni Shrine who are determined to critique the Japanese imperial state which caused so much death and destruction not only on the peoples of Asia but also on its own population. What this project illuminates is that arguments regarding nationalism and state militarism could be made stronger through a critical look at

Yasukuni’s political economy. Specifically, I hope to show that Yasukuni Shrine is connected to a larger systemic logic (Capital-Nation-State) so to disregard the shrine’s political economy not only overlooks a part of its history but it also makes the task of disentangling the shrine from its past impossible.

28 Karatani, The Structure of World History, 1.

Review of Literature

Literature on Yasukuni Shrine in both English and Japanese has been dominated by the

‘Yasukuni Issue’ which has produced scholarship addressing the ideological stakes, the problems regarding constitutional law, international diplomacy, religious freedom, the apology issue, as well as nationalism and state militarism. As this project is focussed on the Meiji period in which many of these problems were not yet associated with the space of Yasukuni, I will not directly deal with this field of literature.29 Instead, I will focus on works that temporally align with my own project.

In English, Akiko Takenaka’s recent book, Yasukuni Shrine: History, Memory, and

Japan’s Unending Postwar gives an in-depth history and analysis of the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ debate from the shrine’s early history right up to the present. This work is an important step in bringing the intricacies and nuances of the politics of the shrine in Japan today to an English audience. In particular, her focus on the space of Yasukuni as a war memorial interrogates the shifting meaning of the shrine as a battleground for the politics of memory. While I am thankful that she undertook such a comprehensive project as it relieved me from such a task and allowed me to focus on one short period of the shrine’s history, there are some important differences in our approach. Perhaps the first difference is that she follows a more conventional historiography of

29 The most prominent collection of scholarship that tackles the postwar debate in English can be found in John Breen, ed., Yasukuni, the War Dead and the Struggle for Japan’s Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). In Japanese there are literally hundreds of texts and articles that touch on the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ in some form. A few of the more prominent works are: Murakami Shigeyoshi, Yasukuni Jinja, 1869—1945—1985 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1986); Kobori Keiichirō, Yasukuni Jinja to Nihonji (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūkai, 1998); Takahashi Tetsuya, Yasukuni Mondai (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2005); Mitsuchi Shūhei, Yasukuni Mondai no Genten (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 2005).

18 the shrine that sees 1945 as the break where Yasukuni becomes a problem.30 The issue that I have with this narrative is that it normalizes the social form of Capital-Nation-State and simply posits Yasukuni Shrine as a legal problem between the state and the nation or as a question of exclusion in terms of religious freedom between the nation and the state. In both cases, the nation and the state are never problematized as a form of social organization.31 The second difference is with our approach to the history of Yasukuni Shrine during the Meiji period. Takenaka follows the lead of Japanese scholars like Ōe Shinobu and Murakami Shigeyoshi who see the shrine as a political and ideological tool of the state.32 I do not disagree with this position, however, as my archival research suggests, this would not be a completely accurate summary of the shrine during the Meiji period as it appears that the meaning of this space was contested by a number of narratives that countered the state’s ideological intentions. This is particularly important in discussing the function of entertainment on the shrine grounds as I argue that it was structurally necessary to keep the shrine financially viable as opposed to being an ideological tool connected to the memorialization of the war dead.

While I do not approach the shrine as a strictly religious site, the role of religion is another way of connecting Yasukuni to the emperor and the state. John Breen, one of the more prolific writers on Yasukuni in the English language, studies the rituals performed at the shrine

30 This problem is not specific to Yasukuni Shrine as much of Japan’s history was being rethought during the Occupation period following the end of the Pacific War by both Japanese and American historians. The most prominent idea that emerged out of this scholarship was by Maruyama Masao and his thesis of Japan’s ‘incomplete modernity’ as an explanation for the events that led to Japanese fascism. 31 This is why such debates lead so easily to comparisons with Germany’s postwar actions in trying to deal with its past. 32 Ōe Shinobu, Yasukuni Jinja (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 190; and Murakami Shigeyoshi, Irei to Shōkon: Yasukuni no Shisō (Tokyo : Iwanami Shoten, 2006), i). This position is also taken by a number of other scholars including Helen Hardacre. See Helen Hardacre, Shintō and the State: 1868-1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 9.

19 and links them to Japan’s Imperial past. He focusses on the ideological role of the emperor at

Yasukuni and determines that the shrine above all is meant to preserve the societal structure of wartime Japan.33 In another article, he connects this idea to the everydayness of Shinto shrines through the ceremonies performed morning, noon and night every day of the year. Rites such as the Rites of Apotheosis which transform the dead into kami and the Rites of Propitiation, which is to pacify and venerate the war dead, are a couple examples of how the everyday practices at a

Shinto shrine relates to Japan’s history of war.34 In regards to understanding the rituals and rites that are performed at Yasukuni Shrine, I suggest that the political economy of such rites also needs to be taken into consideration. Following the scholarship of Allan G. Grapard, I connect the flow of monetary and votive offerings to the shrine as a way to think about how rituals are connected to the idea of the nation.35

In Japanese literature, one of the earliest histories of the shrine was written by Murakami

Shigeyoshi, a historian of Japanese religion. As was stated above, his approach was to examine the religious practices of the pre-Meiji ‘invocation of the dead’ shrines (shōkonsha) in order to understand the role of religion within the emergence of a modern state. Published in 1974, his work was written in the context of the Liberal Democratic Party’s attempt to reinstate Yasukuni

Shrine as a national institution which garnered so much public resistance that it was eventually defeated. Thus his work speaks to the intimate relation between state, religion and the history of

Yasukuni. Ōe Shinobu’s 1984 text on Yasukuni also provides some historical context. As

33 John Breen, “Yasukuni Shrine: Ritual and Memory”, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 3, issue 6 (June, 2005) [http://apjjf.org/-John-Breen/2060/article.html]. 34 John Breen, “The Dead and the Living in the Land of Peace: A Sociology of the Yasukuni Shrine,” Mortality 9, No. 1 (February 2004): 76-93. 35 See Allan G. Grapard. “The Economics of Ritual Power,” In Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami, edited by John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (New York: Routledge, 2000).

20 opposed to other authors, he gives a more in-depth look at some of the early questions that problematized the religious rituals at Yasukuni such as whether or not the spirits of the war dead could be enshrined, and thus worshipped, at both local and national shrines. This example shows that the religious rituals surrounding Yasukuni Shrine were in a development stage throughout the Meiji period and that these practices were not well understood by the general population nor by bureaucrats. Perhaps the author that is closest to my own approach is Tsubouchi Yūzō with his 1999 book Yasukuni. Tsubouchi examines Yasukuni shrine throughout the Meiji period focussing specifically on it as a cultural space. By tracing the various forms of entertainment that took place on the shrine grounds, he connects the shrine to the project of modernity that the Meiji government embarked on. His discussion of the shrine grounds and the space of the city inspired my own research in trying to understand Yasukuni’s influence beyond its own boundaries. While my own project will have some overlap with the content of Tsubouchi’s book, our approach differs in that I want to understand Yasukuni Shrine less as a product of the Meiji period but as a part of its production.

In 2006, in the preface to the reprinting of his book, Murakami Shigeyoshi reflected on his early work by expanding his approach to go beyond a religious history:

...my aim is to study the ideological nature and role of Yasukuni. Various aspects of modern Japanese society such as, the government, military, religion, ideology, education, culture, everyday life, etc., are all intimately (missetsu) related so that any study of the ideology of Yasukuni will have no way forward unless it does so from a pluralistic point of view.36

While I commend this pluralistic approach, the absence of the economic from this list assures me that there is a gap within the field of knowledge regarding Yasukuni Shrine. By addressing this

36 Murakami, Irei to Shōkon, iii.

21 gap, I hope to not only add information to the historical record but to also resituate the contemporary debate around transcending the social domination of the Capital-Nation-State trinity.

Structure of the Dissertation

Chapter 1 situates Yasukuni Shrine within a number of different spatial movements that occurred prior to and after the construction of the shrine in order to explore what Henri Lefebvre calls the production of space. The first movement follows the relocation of the capital from

Kyoto to Tokyo noting that this transition was important for the imagining of a national space in which the shrine played a role as a nation-building space. The second movement focusses on the state’s shift to supporting Shintoism and how this impacted the ideological nature of the shrine forming a strong bond between nation and state. Finally, the last movement is the shift to a commodity economy mediated by money and how crime unsettled everyday life on the shrine grounds. The result is a critique of how capital can disrupt the national and state narratives of

Yasukuni Shrine thus pointing to the fact that, in the early Meiji period, the shrine was a contested space.

The second chapter focusses on the political economy of Yasukuni by examining the structural role that entertainment and festivals played in making the shrine fiscally viable. As a way to situate the role of entertainment and how it shaped the space of the shrine I turn to

Nagano Uheiji’s 1907 redesign of the Yasukuni Shrine grounds. Although his plans never came to fruition, I argue that Nagano’s blueprint captures how the space of the shrine can be seen as a physical fusing of the Capital-Nation-State trinity as discussed by Karatani Kōjin. By placing

Yasukuni Shrine at the nexus of Capital-Nation-State, I hope to further push a critique of capital by thinking about how commodity exchange becomes linked to both the nation and the state.

In chapter 3, I discuss the space of the shrine in connection to the Tokyo land market. By the end of the Meiji period, the built environment of Tokyo had been spatially reorganized by the circulation of capital brought about by the 1873 Land Tax Reform. This chapter outlines how this fusing of capital to the land was forged by the landowning aristocracy who transformed themselves into capitalists via the banking system. Since Yasukuni Shrine was the twenty-third largest landholding entity in the city of Tokyo, it was necessarily tied to the question of ground rent and had an impact on shaping the organization of space in adjacent neighbourhoods. Seeing that the shrine was involved in investing capital onto the shrine grounds, financing public debt and making land transactions, it is evident that the shrine helped give shape to the built environment of Tokyo. By further incorporating how capital has produced the space of the shrine, it also becomes evident how it is tied to the state’s mode of exchange as property values were essential in raising funds for the cash-strapped Meiji government.

The fourth chapter attempts to situate the figure of the soldier at Yasukuni and universal conscription within the Marxist concept of surplus populations. Using two studies by the

Canadian historian of Japan, E. H. Norman, I argue that it is not a historical coincidence that the

Conscription Edict and the Land Tax Reform were both promulgated in 1873. This is because they both were aimed at the emancipation of peasants from the land which resulted in the creation of two types of reserve armies: one military and one industrial. The reserve army of conscripted soldiers assisted in the spatial organization of populations by plucking young men from the rural countryside and dumping them into Japan’s urban cities after being discharged.

Positioning the war dead enshrined at Yasukuni within this management of surplus populations

23 opens up how these bodies can be remembered as being a casualty of more than just the state war machine. Instead, we can see how they become entangled within the operation of Capital-Nation-

State which the shrine, through the mode of exchange of the nation, simply acts to erase.

Chapter 1 From Kyoto to Tokyo: The Production of Space and the Everyday

The programme we have sketched for a critique of everyday life can be summed up as follows: It will involve a methodical confrontation of so-called ‘modern’ life on the one hand, with the past, and on the other—and above all—with the possible, so that the points or sectors where a ‘decadence’ or a withdrawal from life have occurred— the points of backwardness in terms of what is possible—the points where new forms are appearing, rich in possibilities—can be determined.

-Henri Lefebvre37

On the evening of July 25, 1882, a 17 month old baby boy was found on the grounds of

Yasukuni Shrine apparently abandoned by his parents. Nine months later, the full story of how this event unfolded was reported in the local paper, the Yomiuri Shinbun.38 The father was Wada

Kōnosuke from Shitaya-ku Okachi-machi (modern day Ueno), a former samurai who was struggling with his new business venture (shizoku no shōhō). With a failing business and many mouths at home to feed, Wada found himself in an unenviable predicament. Although he and his wife loved their kids, he felt that he could not support another child and thus abandoned it at the shrine without even consulting his wife. When she asked him about the boy, he lied to her saying that he gave it to a rural peasant who desperately wanted a child. But Wada, racked by guilt, was worried that perhaps the boy was never discovered and died alone or, even worse, that he was

37 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume I, [CEL] translated by John Moore (New York: Verso, 2008), 251. 38 Yomiuri Shinbun, 9 March 1883: morning edition, 2.

24 25 eaten by stray dogs. So he turned himself in to the courts admitting his crime and in doing so discovered that someone from the Kōjimachi municipal office had picked up the child. Due to the circumstances in which the child was found, the boy was named Kamizono Yasuji—神園靖

二 denoting that it was found in the ‘garden of the gods’—and was eventually adopted by a Mr.

Matsumoto from Hayabusa-machi.

This story of an abandoned child at Yasukuni is not unique as the Yomiuri printed similar accounts in 1904 and 1908. Nonetheless, this incident exhibits a number of social issues that seeped into the physical space of the shrine. Wada, after all, was from a samurai family which makes his decision to discard the child at Yasukuni interesting as the shrine memorialised the deaths of the now obsolete military class. The samurai as a class were officially disbanded in

1873 and economically freed from the state in 1876 when they were given a lump sum of bonds in lieu of their monthly stipends of rice. While some former samurai turned these bonds into great fortunes by backing the growing finance industry, the majority of samurai fell into financial ruins having failed to transform themselves into profitable merchants. Wada certainly found himself in the latter group as, after only six years, his failing business pushed him to abandon his child over financial concerns. Given the circumstances, abandoning the child seemed to be his only option as the state had already began to crack down on former practices of dealing with unwanted children.

Historians have noted that throughout the Edo period infanticide and abortion were common practices of both peasants and the upper class in order to control their family size and

26 distribution of the sexes.39 However, with the ‘Regulation on Acts of Prescriptions and Abortion by Midwives’ (Sabano Baiyaku Sewa oyobi Dataitō no Torishimari kata) in December of 1868, these practices were legally prohibited. Furthermore, abortion was criminalized after 1880 as the state began to police the deceased by taking over the process of declaring death and the disposal of bodies.40 This was part of the nationalization of the police force, which, along with the court system, brought forth new legal codes that expanded the scope of what was deemed criminal activity. However, as will be demonstrated later in this chapter, although the implementation of new legal codes created a different relation between the law and citizens of the state, it tended to produce familiar results. Thus, through Wada’s unfortunate circumstances it becomes evident how the issues of social class, the state and criminality intersected with the space of the shrine. In other words, we can see how the space of Yasukuni overlaps with and is permeated by the everyday lives of the people who shared that space.

A critique of the everyday was most famously articulated by the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre in a three volume series published between 1947 and 1981. His understanding of the everyday was that it was alive and fluid, always actively being produced despite the fact that it seemed mundane as an object of study. However, for Lefebvre the everyday was anything but mundane because it contained the possibility to spontaneously erupt at any moment and thus had revolutionary potential. Yet before that potential could be interrogated, he argued that it was important to understand how the everyday is structured,

39 T. C. Smith has argued in Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717-1830 that infanticide (mabiki) was certainly part of the reason why population levels stagnated in the second half of the Tokugawa period. See also S. B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan and Chiba Tokuji and Ōtsu Tadao, Mabiki to Mizuko: Kosodate no Fōkuroa. 40 Tokyoshi Shikō Shigaihen, Vol. 63 (Tokyo: Tokyo-to, 1971), 624-631.

27 particularly around the concept of alienation and how being alienated mediates our relation to the everyday. The concept of alienation and space are intrinsically linked since it is space itself that comes to characterize the experience of alienation whether it is in the factory or the slums.41

Thus an important aspect to a critique of the everyday is found in Lefebvre’s theorizing of the production of space. Once again, Lefebvre argues that space as a social construction is never neutral but is actively produced through how it is perceived, conceived and lived. Using these three approaches to space Lefebvre constructed a ‘dialectics of three’ to observe how space is formed and filled whether it is physically, mentally, or socially.

The space of Yasukuni Shrine is also one that is actively being produced today and has a history that shows the traces of that production. In this chapter, I will outline the early history of the shrine, from the late Edo period in the 1850s until the end of the Meiji period in 1912, focussing on the production of space and the everyday. As I suggested in the introduction, how we approach the history of the shrine is important because it determines the boundaries and limits of thought of which this chapter will attempt to disrupt. In regards to the production of space, some scholars focus on how the shrine is perceived in regards to its location within the city of Tokyo, particularly as a space between social classes represented by the physical separation of the high-city and the low-city.42 This approach leads to a discourse of the nation- as-community following the breakdown of the social class system of the Edo period meaning that the space of the shrine is utilized for nation-building. Entwined within this narrative is the shrine’s position as a state institution as it was conceived by and constructed by the emerging

41 Jack Murray states that “space itself is often made to stand for that agent consigning the alienated subject to its alienated state.” In The Landscapes of Alienation: Ideological Subversion in Kafka, Céline, and Onetti (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 78. 42 See Tsubouchi Yūzo (1999) and John Nelson (2003).

Meiji state. This puts Yasukuni Shrine into a direct correlation with the emergence of the nation- state form in Japan, which presently structures both critiques of Yasukuni as well as support for the shrine. However, very few scholars focus on the everyday ‘lived’ experience of life at

Yasukuni particularly in its early history. This separation of the lived experience from the perceived and conceived aspects of this space is important because it fails to capture the early history of the shrine at a point when terms like the ‘Meiji state’ and the ‘nation’ would not have been fully comprehended by those living at that time. Additionally, I want to argue that these unstable categories need to be interrogated by examining how everyday experience had the potential to interrupt and displace the very meaning of these terms. Much like Stephen Kotkin’s approach in Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization where he attempts to show how the ambitions of the state are not always understood and received by the citizens who live and experience these spaces on their own terms, I want to approach the everyday at Yasukuni Shrine as a space that is a contested battleground during the Meiji period. In other words, I want to approach the space of the shrine not simply as an ideological construct but as a space that was experienced and sensed by those who entered that space in ways that the state could not fully control.

While Kotkin is working within the socialist framework of Soviet Russia, this study is, of course, trying to understand Japan as a country that is attempting to develop a capitalist economy. This raises a different set of problems in trying to use the everyday as a mode of critique since Lefebvre’s approach is obviously grounded in an economy that has already been subsumed by capital. My response to this is twofold: first, as Lefebvre argues in his own writing, alienation is not simply a symptom of capitalist societies but derives from the social and the

29 problem of representation.43 This is also why he argues that alienation must be understood dialectically since it is always in movement and that this movement between alienation/disalienation allows us to catch a glimpse of the structure behind it.44 The second point is that we need to understand the development of capitalism in Japan through the historical moment of capital in the late nineteenth century; that is, through the stage of imperialism. This argument was theorized by the Japanese economist Uno Kōzō who, in response to the debate on

Japanese capitalism that occurred in the 1920s and 30s, showed that because of finance capital it was not necessary for all relations of production to become dominated by the capitalist mode of production. This is because finance capital was able to invest itself into specific industries, capture that surplus value and then move on without having to revolutionize all areas of the economy.45 So while most commoners who entered into the space of Yasukuni Shrine during the early Meiji period were not necessarily wage labourers who were economically alienated from the products of their labour, I argue that they were being swept up by the formal subsumption of capital and that it is these socio-economic changes that can bring out contradictions in the state narrative governing the history of Yasukuni Shrine. However, before I embark on a genealogical approach to Yasukuni Shrine, I want to further explore what Lefebvre means by the everyday and the production of space.

43 In the beginning of volume one of Critique of Everyday Life Lefebvre laments that even in the socialist USSR people are always alienated in the everyday. 44 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life Volume II: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, translated by John Moore (New York: Verso, 2008), 207-208. 45 This blurring between what Marx calls “formal” subsumption and “real” subsumption could only work because of the structure of imperialism which creates markets outside of the national economy which act to accelerate the “real” subsumption of capital but only within urban areas where capital accumulated.

1.1 The Everyday and the Production of Space

“Familiarity breeds contempt” is an expression often used when you know someone well enough that you begin to find faults with them to the point that you no longer respect or desire their company. In this context, contempt means to scorn, loathe or maybe even hate. However, if we read contempt as in contempt for, meaning to disregard something that should be taken into account, we can begin to understand what Henri Lefebvre meant when he embarked on theorizing a critique of everyday life. The familiarity of the everyday breeds a certain amount of contempt for what happens around us, it makes us think we know our environment, our relationships, and ourselves but, as Hegel remarks, “what is familiar is not understood precisely because it is familiar.”46 This familiarity allows for what is familiar to become normalized and thus lose its ability to disrupt and force us to recognize it. Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this is with our own subjectivity if we truly invest our identity into a conceived or positivist ideal of the self. Lefebvre uses the metaphor of masks to describe the different roles all of us play in the everyday; for example, I am a friend, son, teacher and citizen all at the same time. And I am also not a friend, not a son, not a teacher and not a citizen all at the same time as well. This broken and compartmentalized subjectivity is what Lefebvre means when he states that “there is no social relation—relation with the other—without a certain alienation.”47

Lefebvre’s contribution to the concept of alienation is to extend its application beyond the worker and the place of production in capitalism: the factory. While Marx did not limit this

46 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 18. 47 Lefebvre, CEL Vol. I, 15.

31 concept to the factory in his own writings, alienation within Marxism tended to focus on the worker being alienated from the products of his labour and from the act of producing while bracketing humanity’s alienation as a species (both nature and spiritual), and finally alienation from others. Lefebvre wants to bridge this gap by looking at how everyday life already produces its own alienations outside of the workplace. For Lefebvre, nonworking life, be it leisure or vacation time, is also colonized by the commodity form as it is the space where the worker becomes the consumer and must buy back the products of his labour.48 Generally scholars have approached leisure as a way for the alienated labourer to cope with his alienation by trying to find meaning in other areas of their life. Lefebvre, on the other hand, notes how leisure time only functions to create new types of alienation and thus necessitates a new social praxis in regards to alienation. This new social praxis is what a critique of the everyday aims to produce.

The everyday as a mode of critique looks at the mundane repetitiveness of everyday life in order to extract the form from the content to see what kind of remainder is left over. With this approach, we can see how the everyday acts as a level of social reality that embodies the ideas and logic of social structures (such as capital, nation, and state) through which our experience is mediated. In other words, the everyday (experienced life) is what mediates the gap between what we perceive (through our senses) and what is conceived (thought prior to the senses). This third

48 Lefebvre goes on to say that “the relation between leisure and the everyday is not a simple one: the two words are at one and the same time united and contradictory (therefore their relation is dialectical). It cannot be reduced to the simple relation in time between ‘Sunday’ and ‘weekdays’, represented as external and merely different. Leisure—to accept the concept uncritically for the moment—cannot be separated from work… We must therefore imagine a ‘work-leisure’ unity… [to] study the way the life of workers as such, their place in the division of labour and in the social system, is ‘reflected’ in leisure activities, or at least in what they demand of leisure.” Ibid., 29-30.

32 realm of experience that Lefebvre introduces is meant to resist the dialectical structure that reduced everything to the base-superstructure model, as well as other dualisms.49

It is out of this dialectical character of the everyday that Lefebvre wants to make implicit and central to his critique in order to produce a politics that can transform how life is lived. In fact, he states that “to know the everyday is to want to transform it”50 so that our critique can produce action; a praxis. So, even though the everyday is coded by the commodity form (when we sell our labour power in exchange for wages or as we view advertisements on our TV at home), it also has the power and possibility for revolutionary social change. This is why

Lefebvre argues that the everyday is “doubly determined” because it is both a residual deposit and a product. It is a product of structures such as ideologies, language, culture, and institutions that shape the space of everyday experience and it is residual because the “unformed spills over from forms. It evades them….The everyday is ‘that’, a something which reveals the inability of forms to grasp, to integrate it and to exhaust it.”51 For Lefebvre, it is these residual elements of the everyday that open up a space for real politics to happen. This led to his love and nostalgia for the medieval festival as a means to interrupt the everyday since people simply stopped

‘performing’ and thus removed their masks (the festival will be taken up in the next chapter).

It is difficult to talk about everyday life and not invoke the concept of space. From the space of our homes to the space where we work and all the spaces in between, they produce a

49 This idea of Lefebvre has been used to contemplate a ‘thirdspace’ or ‘trialectics’ which was most famously articulated by Edward Soja in his text Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 50 Lefebvre, CEL Vol. 2, 98. 51 Ibid., 64.

33 physical mapping of how we experience the everyday. Lefebvre’s own ‘spatial turn’ came near the end of his prolific writing career and was certainly influenced by the May 1968 student protests in France in which the space of the city became a battleground.52 This led to a project which he called spatiology in which he aimed at creating a ‘unitary theory of space’ which in some ways was a critique of the functionalism of urban planning in the postwar period.53 To accomplish this, he once again turned to trialectics to understand how physical space, mental space, and social space overlapped to actively produce a space—his reminder that space is never just itself and that it can’t simply exist as is. Methodologically, this “spatial triad”, even though they all overlap, is broken into three specific parts: spatial practices (perceived), representations of space (conceived), and spaces of representation (lived). Spatial practice is how space relates to the natural world and its environment. It includes landmarks, paths and natural boundaries like rivers and mountains which produces a sense of location. For Lefebvre, it also includes networks of interaction and communication that connect our everyday experiences like work with leisure.

He referred to this mode as perceived space in that it is grasped by our senses. Representations of space are always constructed whether it is by architects or engineers, planners or bureaucrats, it is always a space that has been first conceived. This aspect of a space that appears in thought prior to coming into terms with our senses is the realm of ideology, power and knowledge. Thus it tends to be the dominant mode of space since its abstraction allows us to engage it prior to any

52 The Production of Space (1974) was his fifty-seventh book. 53 Lukasz Stanek writes that Lefebvre was “critically reacting to the post-structuralist rethinking of the tradition of Western philosophy, and writing in the wake of the urban crisis in the 1960s and 1970s, Lefebvre considers this fragmentation of space as a theoretical fallacy with practical ramifications and also a symptom of the economic, social, political, technological, and cultural reality of twentieth-century capitalism. With the envisaged ‘unitary theory’ of space, he sought to theorize space as the shared aspect and outcome of all social practices, investigating what remains common to spaces differentiated by historically specific conditions of their production.” Lukasz Stanek, “Space as Concrete Abstraction: Hegel, Marx, and modern urbanism in Henri Lefebvre,” in Space, Difference, Everyday Life: Reading Henri Lefebvre, edited by Kanishka Goonewardena, et al (New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2008), 63.

34 experience of it. Finally, spaces of representation are the spaces of everyday life as it is experienced. It is the lived space that is alive and dynamic but always elusive because it cannot quite be captured by the representations of space that want to dominate it.

The rest of this chapter will now turn to the genealogical origins of Yasukuni Shrine in order to establish how the space of the shrine is produced and experienced through the everyday using Lefebvre’s spatiology as a framework. As was mentioned earlier, my approach is to try and understand Yasukuni shrine and the production of space at a moment when these spaces are not necessarily dominated by any particular form. That is, the ideological space of Yasukuni Shrine is still being conceived which makes a study of the everyday that much more interesting since it opens up the possibility for the ‘unformed’ or residual deposits to not only erupt but to also counter the narrative of the state. The next three sections will incorporate Lefebvre’s concepts of perceived, conceived and lived space in relation to three other spatial movements that are occurring during this historical moment: nation, state, and capital.

1.2 From Kyoto to Tokyo as Spatial Practice

The surrender of the city of Edo in March 1868 by the Shogun’s vassal and de facto commander of the military, Katsu Kaishū (1823-1899), marked the turning point in the Boshin

War since the fall of the Tokugawa regime’s administrative center meant that those loyal to the military government (bakufu) were now left to fight on their own. Although the war would go on for another year, the fall of Edo initiated the process of the shifting of sovereign power from

Kyoto to, what would shortly become, Tokyo, allowing for a merger of the sovereign with the governmental facet of the state. In this section, I want to focus on how the shift towards Tokyo is

35 one that was foreshadowed by a ‘invocation of the dead’ service (shōkonsai) that took place in

Edo Castle on June 2, 1868, and that this ceremony as well as the construction of Yasukuni

Shrine on Kudan Hill is closely tied to Lefebvre’s concept of perceived space. Arguably this spatial movement was also important in the formation of a national space as the geographical location of Tokyo already factored into the perceived space of the nation due to its centrality in relation to the imagined borders of the state, Hokkaido and Kyushu. Within the city itself, the location of Yasukuni Shrine on Kudan Hill proved to be an important aspect of how the urban space of Tokyo would be experienced in the day-to-day life of people who called the national capital their home. Particularly the hill itself factored into the consciousness of the locals as the shrine quickly became an important city landmark during the Meiji period.54 Adding to this image of the shrine as protruding from the hilltop was the city’s historical socio-spatial division, the class-based split between what is called the high-city and the low-city, which was a product of Tokyo’s topology. These elements will be discussed through the reimagining of Tokyo first by the imperial occupiers and then how this space was perceived by literary figures of the Meiji period.

The rather peaceful arrival of the imperial troops into the city of Edo is usually why historians have tended to characterize the Meiji Restoration as a bloodless revolution. However, the time between the transitioning of power from the Tokugawa government to the Meiji state proved to be difficult for those who called Edo their home. In 1868, almost one third of the population of Edo left for the countryside including most of those who participated in the actual day-to-day governing of the city leaving a chaotic mess behind. In his diary, Katsu notes that it

54 For example, by the middle of the Meiji period Kudan Hill was already associated as one of the three big sites of Tokyo to view the cherry blossoms in spring (Ueno and Shiba Parks being the other two). In fact, the shrine, hoping to further its reputation as a place to view cherry blossoms, planted an additional 380 trees in December of 1892.

36 was as if a fire at engulfed the city as people rushed about disregarding all laws or order.55 While the imperial occupation led by Prince Arisugawa tried to bring some order back to daily life, the people of Edo often mocked the new rulers as they were either ambivalent to their presence or still supported the Tokugawa state. Fukuchi Gen’ichiro, a translator for the bakufu, was not particularly against the imperial court but saw the shift in power as the creation of a second bakufu only this time under the leadership of Satsuma and Chōshū.56 Along with the dissent of the people of Edo, the occupation leaders also had to contend with the many pro-bakufu resistance fighters such as the Shōgitai who were holding out in the north-eastern part of the city.

The Shōgitai forces numbered close to four thousand and were constantly using small groups to attack the imperial soldiers or generally cause havoc in the city. On May 11, 1868,

Ōmura Masujirō was appointed the chief of Edo as a newly organized metropolitan district and within his role as a military tactician he began to draw up plans to expunge the pro-Tokugawa forces from the city.57 Up against formidable odds and a fortified opponent, the imperial forces made plans to attack on the morning of May 15. Led by Saigō Takamori, they planned to split their forces, with Saigō making a frontal attack on the Black Gate (Kuromon) while Ōmura would make an assault from the rear. Saigō’s Satsuma forces suffered heavy losses that day but the resistance was broken. To honour those who died in the Battle of Ueno, three weeks later on

June 2 an ‘invocation of the dead’ service was held inside of Edo Castle signifying the birth of the Meiji regime.

55 Katsube Mitake, ed., Katsu Kaishū Zenshū, Vol. 19 (Tokyo: Keisō, 1973), 36. 56 Fukuchi Gen’ichirō, “Shinbunshi Jitsureki,” in Fukuchi Ōchishū (Tokyo: Chikuma, 1966), 326. 57 Ōmura was working with Etō Shimpei who was a supporter of making Edo the political center of the imperial regime and had proposed an outline of how to consolidate power in the country.

The ceremony began at 5:30 in the morning and took place in the Nishinomaru section of the castle grounds, where the current imperial palace (kyūden) now stands. Prior to the ceremony a sacred space was cleared and the ground purified by priests from the Department of Divinities in order to create a primitive shrine (himorogi). This included the erection of an altar (tamatoko) and the collection of small sakaki branches. After the preparations were finished, the invited guests took their seats as the master of ceremonies (saishu or matsuri no tsukasa) in a hushed voice began the intoning of the ritual prayers (norito) inviting the gods to participate.58 Sitting on the north side of the grounds and beside the altar were the honoured guests, Prince Arisugawa- no-miya, and members of the Imperial court (kugyō). Directly in front of the altar sat the head priest (shinji sōsai) and behind him were seated the master of ceremonies as well as those who helped carry out the rituals. Sitting to the south of them were military officials, distinguished members from loyal fiefs (han) and commanding officers. The ceremony started with the sakaki branches being offered at the altar while music was played using a flute and drums. After the music stopped, the head priest handed the imperial message to the master of ceremonies who prayed standing in front of the altar reading it in a loud voice. The honoured guests then took turns worshipping by bowing twice and clapping in front of the altar. Once everyone had a chance to worship, they returned to their seats. The music began once again as the representatives from the Department of Divinities stood to remove the offerings after which the music stopped. The master of ceremonies followed by the assistants and the musicians offered

58 The master of ceremonies was often performed by a member of the military or navy. At this event it was Okubo Hatsutarō—later named Haruno—(1846-1915) who was a descendent of the Odawara Daimyō and served as a Shinto priest in Shizuoka before fighting in the Boshin War. He became a full General in 1908 after seeing action in the First Sino-Japanese War and the Russo-Japanese War (after which he received the Order of the Rising Sun). He finished his career as the commander of the Korean Imperial Army (Chosen-gun) in 1911.

38 the sake and dried fish to the others. Then the master of ceremonies, in a whispered voice, sent off the gods with a prayer after which the ceremony ended and everyone departed.

This ceremony is interesting for many reasons and not just because it leads to the construction of Yasukuni Shrine just one year later in 1869.59 For a start, the location of the ceremony is significant. Holding it at Edo Castle was certainly an intentional decision that was meant to symbolise the end of Tokugawa rule as arguably it would have been more fitting to have held the ceremony in Ueno on the battlefield where the soldiers of Satsuma and Chōshū gave their lives for the imperial cause. The castle itself had no significance to the imperial house and was only being used by the occupiers as a command base that was probably chosen simply because it provided some safety and distance from a hostile population.60 Also, at this point, there was no notion that the imperial family would take up residence at the castle as well.

Nonetheless, the symbolism would have been obvious not only for those that participated in the ceremony but also for the remaining Tokugawa family and retainers whose fate was already determined in May when their feudal stipend was drastically reduced. The following month of

July saw over 100,000 people leave the city continuing a trend that started in 1862 with the end of the alternate attendance system (sankin kōtai), which had forced the leaders of every han to hold some form of residence in Edo. This emptying out of the city was a major factor in moving

59 In the first chapter of Yasukuni Jinja Shi (Tokyo: Yasukuni Jinja, 1911), the author notes that this is usually said to be the origin (kigen) of the Tokyo Shōkonsha. Nonetheless, there were other similar ceremonies as one month following the fall of Edo it was announced that there would be a shōkonsai in Kyoto’s Higashiyama on May 10, 1868. On July 10-11 a ceremony was held at the Kawahigashi Military Parade Ground although no shrine was actually erected on that site. 60 Three parts of the castle complex (Nishinomaru, Honmaru and Ninomaru) were destroyed by fire in 1863. The Nishinomaru was replaced with a temporary structure and served as the residence of the Meiji Emperor until 1873 when a fire destroyed it. A new residence was not completed until 1888 in which during this time the emperor lived in an old daimyo residence in Akasaka.

39 the capital to Tokyo because the imperial forces saw this open space as an opportunity (which will be discussed in further detail in Chapter Three).

Secondly, holding the ceremony at Edo Castle also foreshadowed the moving of the capital, which was not officially announced until July 17 of that year. As will become evident later in this chapter, the June 2nd shōkonsai materialized out of similar ceremonies that were held in Kyoto in the early 1860s. Thus this ceremony linked the two cities together already displaying a shift in power towards what would become the new capital of Japan. In that sense, we can think of the purification ceremony that occurred prior to the shōkonsai as not only preparing the ground for the spirits of the dead but also in preparation for the arrival of the emperor which occurred on October 13, 1868, after which Emperor Meiji took up residence in the Nishinomaru area of the castle.

Finally, the ceremony held in Edo Castle is interesting because the officials who are present at the ceremony represent the three factions that will form the dominant narrative surrounding Yasukuni Shrine: Shinto priests (members from the Department of Divinities and the head priest), the imperial state (Prince Arisugawa and other members of the imperial household), and the military (this time represented by Ōkubo Hatsutarō). Of course, at the center stands the image of the emperor, young Mutsuhito, who was only fifteen years old when he arrived in his new capital, Tokyo. This third point, however, factors more into how Yasukuni

Shrine as a space was conceived rather than how it was perceived. To understand how the space of the shrine becomes one that can be perceived, we need to unfold how it came to be situated on top of Kudan Hill.

In 1869, consultations regarding the construction of a centralized ‘shrine for the invocation of spirits’ (shōkonsha) in Tokyo occurred among Prince Komatsu Akihito (1846-

1903), who was instructed to build it from the Grand Council of State (Daijyōkan), Ōmura

Masujirō (1824-1869)61, Kagawa Keizō (1841-1915)62, Funakoshi Yonosuke (1840-1913)63,

Masuda Toranosuke, Satō Kashichirō and Matsuoka Shinshichirō. The decision to construct a shōkonsha on Kudan Hill is generally credited to Ōmura Masujirō although other places were considered, including Akasaka and Ueno. Many of the emerging leaders of the Meiji government thought that Ueno would be an appropriate place since it was where many imperial soldiers died just a year before. Ōmura, influenced by Kido Takayoshi, also suggested that it be built in Ueno replacing the destroyed Kan’eiji Temple but this was rejected as it would disturb the dead spirits already there (bokon no chi).64 The land around Ueno was in high demand after it was cleared by fires following the fierce battle there in 1868 between the imperial forces and the pro-bakufu resistance fighters (Shōgitai). The Ministry of Education hoped to use it for a medical school while the military wanted it for a hospital and at that time their appeals were placed in higher priority than the construction of a new shrine. In the end, Ōmura settled on a plot of land measuring just over 100 hectares on top of Kudan hill because of its proximity to the emperor’s residence. This undeveloped piece of land was formerly a bakufu military training ground (tonjō) and along it stood some residences belonging to the Shogun’s retainers which, by this time, most people in the area had already abandoned. The selection of the land was also determined by the

61 Who was a military leader from Chōshū and became the head of the Ministry of War until he was assassinated in 1869. 62 He later became the high steward for the Empress and a member of the Privy Council. 63 More commonly known as Funakoshi Mamoru, he was later a member of the House of Peers. 64 Kido Takayoshi was in favor of Ueno as he thought the shrine there would purify the ground for the fallen soldiers. “15 January 1869,” The Diary of Kido Takayoshi Vol. 1, trans. by Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko Hirota (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983), 184.

41 topography of the city as Kudan Hill sits on one of the ridges of the Musashino Plateau, which forms the landscape of the western side of the city.

The general topography of the city of Edo has already been well documented as a division between what is called the high-city (yamanote) and the low-city (shitamachi).65 The commoners dwelled in the area to the east of the castle while the vassals and the retainers of the bakufu lived in the high part of the city which began to the north (with the Ueno and Hongo

Plateaus) and southwest (with the Akasaka-Azabu and Shiba-Shirogane Plateaus) of the castle grounds. This division emerged after the Great Meireki Fire in 1657 which lasted for three days and destroyed upwards of seventy percent of the city. As Edo became repopulated the city increasingly started to sprawl to the west and by 1713 the areas of Koishikawa, Ushigome,

Ichigaya, Yotsuya, Akasaka, and Azabu all officially became part of the city. The elevated areas to the west became particularly popular with the thousands of retainers and samurai who accompanied their feudal leaders, the daimyō, to Edo as part of the alternate attendance system.

However, as Jinnai Hidenobu points out, with this type of geographical blueprint it is the valleys and slopes in between the high and the low city that created a space for intercourse between the two communities.66 The commoner districts in the valleys were often built on small plots of land between the roads and the cliffs mimicking life in the low-city. These merchants sold their goods to the residents of the high-city while other tradesmen like carpenters also made use of these spaces to sell their services.

65 In English, Edward G. Seidensticker’s Low City, High City gives an overview of Tokyo from 1867 to 1923 using this geographical division to narrate the history of the city often in an anecdotal style. 66 Jinnai Hidenobu, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, trans. by Nishimura Kimiko (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 61-64.

Although I have been using Kudan Hill to denote the location where Yasukuni Shrine was constructed, a direct translation of kudanzaka would be the slope of Kudan. Thus the shrine itself falls into this space between two communities: the high-city and the low-city. In terms of how Yasukuni Shrine is a perceived space, this positioning between communities is important.

As Tsubouchi Yūzō has already pointed out, Yasukuni was a space that was meant to facilitate nation-building simply through its geographical location.67 Events held on the shrine grounds facilitated interaction between the classes and the slope leading up to the shrine (or leading down to the city) helped form this perception that one was entering a different space. Minakami

Takitarō68 (1887-1940) also references this space between social classes in his first story

Yamanote no ko (1911), which was printed in the literary magazine Mita Bungaku. This autobiographical work focussed on a young boy who wanted to play with the kids from the low-city but his mother would not let him. Nonetheless, he disregarded his mother’s wishes and often met the lower class kids to play at local shrines. Tayama Katai’s (1872-1930) memoirs provide his own take on traversing Kudan Hill in the 1880s while walking from his house in Ushigome to

Kanda. He reminisces about cutting through the shrine grounds and walking down the slope to the low-city which was much steeper than it is today. In particular, he remembers a bird shop on the slope of Kudan, which often caught his attention and he regularly entered it with his brother to view the cockatoos, parrots, greenfinches, skylarks and mynahs.69 He also recalls climbing the

67 Tsubouchi Yūzo, Yasukuni, (Tokyo: Shinchōsa, 1999), 49-50. This is also quoted in John Nelson, “Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Commemoration Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine”, The Journal of East Asian Studies, Vol. 62, No. 2, 2003, 447. 68 His real name was Abe Shōzō and was born in Azabu in the high-city. He was the son of the founder of the Meiji Life Insurance Company where he worked from 1916 while writing novels on urban life. 69 Tayama Katai, Literary Life in Tokyo, 1885-1915: Tayama Katai’s memoirs ‘Thirty years in Tokyo’ (New York: Brill, 1987), 59.

43 hill in 1892 to view the fire in Kanda’s Sarugakuchō along with throngs of others who were trying to catch a glimpse of the destruction.

Kudan Hill was also famous because of its altitude sitting above the low-city providing great views of the old city and Tokyo Bay. While it is hard to believe today, the lighthouse that still sits on top of Kudan Hill to the south of the shrine was first lit up on November 11, 1871. At that time, it was used to guide ships up and down Tokyo’s many waterways but it also became a landmark of its own. In an 1890 publication called Tokyo Meisho Zue the author Nakano even features the lighthouse along with pictures of the war museum and the shrine in its piece on

Yasukuni. The lighthouse added a certain ambiance to Yasukuni after sundown that added to its reputation for offering stunning night views. The playwright and translator, Wakatsuki Shiran

(1879-1962), writing in 1911 gives his impression of Kudan:

The Kudanzaka (nine-level slope) does not live up to its name as it only takes a short ride to reach the top by train. However, it is an unusually time-consuming hill to climb otherwise even though it would not take any more than a minute (by train). As for myself, I love climbing up and down the hill during the long summer nights. While I descend into the gloominess as the faint light of the sunset finally fades away, the bright glare from the tiled roofs fades and you can see the trees of Ueno, to the elevated grounds of Koishikawa in Hongō, from Kanda and Nihonbashi to Honjo and the sky of Fukagawa. At the same time, all over the city an infinite number of big and small lamps turn on one by one.70

During the Meiji period, Kudan Hill was also renowned for its views of Fuji Mountain as well as a place to enjoy the spring cherry blossoms. Tayama Katai was particularly interested in visiting

Yasukuni Shrine and taking in the sights during cherry blossom season.

When you go viewing the blossoms you should also note how the girls vary from place to place too. You can still view pretty girls at

70 Wakatsuki Shiran, Tokyo Nenjū Gyōji, vol. 2, edited by Asakura Haruhiko (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1968), 258.

Ueno, but as you move from Asakusa to Mukōjima the quality drops right off, and they get really coarse. On the other hand there’s Kudan. If your luck’s in at Kudan you can view extremely beautiful, elegant, high-class girls. They’re a very different type. And, it’s nice and quiet there, without too much of a crowd. When it comes to quietly viewing blossoming beauty, you can’t beat it.71

From these first person accounts of Kudan Hill by those who lived in Tokyo, we can see the connections with Lefebvre’s notion of spatial practice. After all, Lefebvre stated that space as a social practice “presupposes the body” as it creates a spatial awareness through the senses.72 In this manner, the space of Yasukuni Shrine was characterized by its location on the edge of the

Musashino Plateau which not only placed it on an elevated piece of land near the Imperial

Palace, but between the high-city and the low-city. This space which had once marked the boundaries between social classes now fused them together signifying the production of a national space. The movements through the space of the shrine, which included discussions of climbing up and down the hill or overlooking the city, are other aspects of the topography and geographical location of the shrine that shaped how people perceived that space. What I want to suggest is that this awareness of the space of the shrine is not a production of ideology but rather how people grasped it through their senses and then mentally mapped it to produce an understanding of the city and nation around them.

71 Tayama, 91-92. 72 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 40.

1.3 From Kyoto to Tokyo as Representations of Space

By the time construction began on Yasukuni Shrine, the Boshin War had come to an end.

Kudan Hill was surveyed on June 12, 1869, and construction of the inner sanctuary of the Main

Hall (honden) began a week later on June 19 after receiving the land from the Tokyo

Metropolitan Office. Within a few days, a temporary shrine was finished which included the altar and the sacred mirror (shinkyō) from the ceremony that was held in Edo Castle a year earlier.73 After its completion, the area around the shrine was cleared in order to facilitate a festival and accommodate the large crowds that were expected to participate. The clearing of the land was not just grounds keeping work but involved the removal of some permanent structures as well. Kido Takayoshi, who took up residence in one of the old estates that backed onto the shrine grounds, noted that on June 26th, many of the tradesmen’s shops were removed along

Kudanzaka in order to make room for the shrine.74 Finally, by June 28th, the shrine was ready to be unveiled just in time for its first festival which would run for the next five days to the delight of many of Tokyo’s residents.

The construction of the main hall (honden) and the placement of the altar and sacred mirror are the material results of what Lefebvre would call the production of conceived space.

These representations of space include the realm of architects, engineers, and bureaucrats that not only shape a space materially but also form it by giving it meaning. It is the space that is linked to ideology and the production of knowledge. It is what is conceived in thought prior to the senses which allows us to know a space without ever having to have entered it. Lefebvre

73 The completion of the permanent shrine was not completed until almost five years later in May 1872. 74 Kido, “June 26, 1869”, The Diary of Kido Takayoshi Vol. 1, 248-249.

46 argues that representations of space are always the dominant mode in the production of space since it is closely tied to power and thus the state. In terms of Yasukuni Shrine, conceived space is what constitutes how we think of the shrine and invokes images of the ‘trinity’ of Yasukuni: militarism, the emperor system, and state Shinto.

This section will also use the image of a shift from Kyoto to Tokyo to trace the genealogy of the ideological framework of Yasukuni Shrine. If the shift from Kyoto to Tokyo in perceived space was characterized by the location of Tokyo as the center of an imagined nation, the parallel shift in conceived space can be observed through religious rituals with the shift from the

Buddhist memorial service (kuyō) to the Shinto invocation of the dead ceremony (shōkonsai). As part of this shift, I also want to bring attention to how the form of the nation (in the broad sense of the term as a community) became fused with that of the state as the Meiji government took a more defined position on religion by promoting the practices of Shintoism. As this shift to

Shintoism became a normalized practice across the country through the 1860s, it gave birth to a formalized shōkonsha system organized by the state which was later referred to as the nation- protecting shrines (gokuku jinja) in the 1930s.

The arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry in Uraga Harbour in July of 1853 is generally considered to be what set off two decades of chaos and civil war that led to the downfall of the

Tokugawa government. This textbook narrative, although it neglects the internal factors surrounding the growth of a commodity economy and its impact on social order due to the rise of the merchant class, nonetheless does factor into the emergence of the ‘revere the emperor, expel the foreigners’ (sonnō jōi) movement that began after the Treaty of Kanagawa was signed between Perry and the bakufu. The movement borrowed its name and philosophy from the Neo-

Confucian writings of Aizawa Seishisai (1782-1863) who in his 1825 New Theses (Shinron)

47 outlined the idea of a ‘national polity’ (kokutai) as a defence against the perceived threat to political order from external foreign influences.75 The ideas behind the New Theses gained popularity after the failure of the Tempo Reforms in the 1830s and 1840s, which resulted in a weakened central government that was constantly being territorially tested by some of the stronger han in the westernmost region of the country. This unrest by the 1850s began to coalesce around the figure of the emperor as a counter-power to the Shogunate. The Sonnō-jōi movement garnered most of its followers from the Chōshū and Satsuma clans who were disgruntled with the federalist system of governance (bakuhan) in which their political and economic power was limited by the central government. By the late 1850s the relationship between these western han and the centralized bakufu reached a critical disjuncture over three issues: the U.S.-Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce in 1858, the debate over the shogun’s successor (keishi mondai),76 and the ‘unity of the court and the bakufu’ movement (kōbu gattai undo).77 The result was a number of bloody encounters over the next decade that would eventually stage the battle lines for the Boshin Civil War. It is also out of these conflicts between the bakufu and the sonnō jōi movement that gave birth to religious ceremonies designed to honour the war dead.

In December of 1862, han members of Tsuwano (present day Shimane Prefecture),

Chōshū (Yamaguchi), and Ōmi (Shiga) gathered for what Murakami Shigeyoshi refers to as the

75 For more on Aizawa’s Shinron see Harry Harootunian, Toward Restoration: The Growth of Political Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970) and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Anti-foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 76 The 13th Shogun, Tokugawa Iesada (1824-1858), was childless thus dividing the court into various factions. 77 The Kōbu gattai undō aimed at strengthening the bakuhan system by trying to increase the influence of the court into bakufu politics. Takagi Shunsuke, “Tōbakuha no keisei,” Kōza Nihonshi 5: Meiji Ishin, (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1970), 122.

48 first “nation-wide shōkonsai” in Kyoto.78 Near a burial facility at Higashiyama’s Ryōzan, the master of ceremonies, Yoshikawa Miyuki, honoured those who had died fighting for the imperial cause in the Ansei Purge (1858-1860) and the Sakurada Gate Incident (1860). Although

Murakami refers to this as a shōkonsai I want to point out a couple of important distinctions between the ceremony that occurred in Kyoto in 1862 and the one in Edo Castle that was previously discussed. First, in Kyoto the bodies of the martyrs (jyun’nansha) were actually buried onsite and you can still go to see the gravestones today at the Reimeisha on Higashiyama in Kyoto. This would not be allowed under the shōkonsha system since, according to Shinto ritual, having the deities stay at that site for a prolonged period of time would prove difficult for the priests to manage. That is why the deities are invited to (shōkon) the shrine and then sent off at the end of the ceremony. The second reason is that this ceremony was conducted by both

Shinto and Buddhist priests. The influence of Buddhism can be seen with the onsite burial of the bodies as well as the form of the ceremony which derived from the Buddhist memorial service

(kūyo). I think these distinctions are important to make because the Shinto component of the shōkonsai not only offers the religious doctrine behind the pacification of the spirits (kami) but it also is what unites the figure of the emperor to this ritual. Here we can see how the elements of community through religious association were wedded to the state which of course was one of the major issues for the postwar constitution that sought to separate it from religion. This also points to the role of the shōkonsha in the project of nation building.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that the shōkonsai ceremony was not simply a tradition begun by the Meiji state but rather was born out of Tokugawa political thought. The

78 Murakami Shigeyoshi, Irei to Shōkon: Yasukuni no shisō, fifth edition (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2006), 7.

49 origins of ceremonies honouring the dead are debatable as some scholars have tried to connect them to the Neo-Confucianism of the Mito School79 while others tie it to the rise of a national consciousness that was forming in the 1860s.80 We do know that the practice of commemorating the war dead began in western Japan where in 1851 a memorial service (kuyō) was held by the

Chōshū Daimyō at the family grave. He paid the Rinzai School Tōshun temple in Yamaguchi 10 pieces of silver to officiate the service which included recording the names of those who died along with the place and date of death. Two years later, a Buddhist memorial service (chōsai) was held again at Tōshun temple on June 14 and this became an annual service. The shift from the Buddhist memorial service (kuyō) to a full Shinto invocation of spirit ceremony (shōkonsai) seems to occur after the 1862 ceremony in Kyoto. In 1863, a similar ceremony to the one on

Higashiyama was held on the grounds of Gion Shrine in July where a small shrine was erected.

This time it was a private ceremony enshrining 64 warriors, including Sanjyō Sanetsumu (1802-

1859) and Tokugawa Nariaki (1800-1860). Interestingly, attending both ceremonies was the

National Learning (kokugaku) scholar Fukuba Bisei (1831-1907) who, after 1868, became a bureaucrat in the Office of Divinities (Jingi Jimukyoku) and played a role in forming imperial rites as well as the shrine system, which I will come back to later in this section. During this time, he traveled extensively through Chōshū spreading the teachings of kokugaku, which emphasized both the importance of Shinto and the imperial court. Probably due to his efforts, in

February of 1864 a place for the invocation of spirits (shōkonjyō) was constructed in

Shimonoseki to enshrine those who died during the Shimonoseki Campaign against Great

79 This is the position Kojima Tsuyoshi argues for in his book Yasukuni Shikan: Bakumatsu Ishin to iu Shinen in which he looks to Aizawa’s “New Thesis” (Shinron) in connecting the idea of the kokutai to the emperor instead of the shogun. Thus those are enshrined at Yasukuni died for the emperor and not the nation (pg. 96). 80 Murakami Shigeyoshi argues that since the ceremonies superseded the feudal boundaries of the han they were already asserting the nation-state as a model of political community. Irei to Shōkon, 12.

Britain, France, the Netherlands and the United States. Thus when the shrine was finally completed in July of the following year, a Shinto service was held.

The switch from Buddhist to Shinto services was part of what James Ketelaar has called the “making of a heresy” as the emerging figure of the emperor and the domestic nativist religion of Shinto began to challenge the place of the more established Buddhist rituals by claiming the latter was a profanation.81 By the outbreak of the Meiji Restoration, Buddhist practices were already being discarded by the Meiji state in favor of instituting Shinto services that conformed more closely to the heritage of the imperial household. While it is not unusual for new regimes to institute different religious practices, what is interesting about this particular transformation is the haste in its execution. For example, in 1868 the newly formed Shrine Affairs Office (Jinja bugyō) oversaw the legalization of Shinto funerals in Satsuma, which was only the first step in outlawing Buddhist funeral services. Ketelaar gives the example of the death of Shimazu Eko

(1851-1869), who was the wife of the 29th lord of Satsuma, to denote the sudden change from

Buddhist to Shinto ceremonies.82 Occurring only three months after Emperor Komei’s (1847-

1866) third memorial service, the service was the first in Satsuma that would contain no

Buddhist elements. Komei, who was the last emperor to be buried with a Buddhist funeral, also marked this transition since by the third memorial service in 1868 it also consisted of only Shinto practices. The transition from Buddhist to Shinto funeral practices was undertaken with such

81 John Breen argues against this thesis stating that Ketelaar had misread some of his primary documents by Kamei Koremi (1824-1885) who does not intend to make Buddhism into a heresy. John Breen, “Ideologues, bureaucrats and priests: on ‘Shinto’ and ‘Buddhism’ in early Meiji Japan,” from Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami, edited by John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2000), 236-237. 82 James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 60.

51 religious zeal that there was even an attempt to erase Buddhism from history itself. Ketelaar explains:

In the last months of 1869, the Shimazu clan transferred all its memorial services, which for the last seven hundred years had been held at the Fukushōji, to the newly constructed Tsurugake Shrine; they simultaneously changed all temples officially related to the clan into Shinto shrines. All Shimazu family members who, as devout Buddhists over the last centuries, had received posthumous Buddhist names (hōgō) were also given Shinto appellations (kaigō; literally, ‘revised name’). These names were actually carved into each and every one of the clan members’ gravestones (there are hundreds), often over the freshly chiseled-away Buddhist name.83

John Breen adds that the attacks on Buddhist temples and practices were part of a more general attack on religious activities which included action against Shinto shrines as well. The principle actors behind these attacks were Fukuba Bisei and Kamei Koremi (1824-1885) who sought to dismiss the former Tokugawa Shinto schools of thought and instead create a new Shinto for a new Meiji state.84 What they referred to as ‘restoration Shinto’ is summarized by Fukuba’s edict written in 1871 which states that all shrines should be “sites for the performance of state ritual.”85 The shōkon ceremonies obviously played an integral part in creating this new Shinto since they helped forge the relation between religion and the state centred on the figure of the emperor. The rapid spread of shōkonsha all across the country in the early years of the Meiji period also points to the importance that they held in spreading this position on the use of religious sites.

83 Ibid., 61. 84 John Breen, “Ideologues, bureaucrats and priests: on ‘Shinto’ and ‘Buddhism’ in early Meiji Japan,” 234. 85 Miyachi Masato, “Shūkyō hōrei ichiran,” Nihon Kindai Shisō Taikei 5: Shūkyō to Kokka, edited by Yasumaru Yoshio and Miyachi Masato (Tokyo: Iwanami, 1988), 425. As quoted in Breen, Shinto in History, 236.

The popularity of the shōkonsha is evident in the number of ceremonies held in the first two years after the Meiji Restoration. In 1868 and 1869, there were over twenty services enshrining roughly 1500 war dead from Kumamoto in the south to Hakodate in the north.

Generally, any place there was a major battle or if a large number of the war dead were from the same area, a shōkonsha was constructed and services were carried out by local priests. Since the shrines did not need to be extravagant structures (or even permanent ones) and really only needed to have an altar (himorogi), it was financially viable to quickly prepare for a ceremony and thus the practice was easily instituted. From 1865-1870, there were a total of 105 shōkonsha constructed across the country and this was accomplished without any formal direction from the state or Shinto leaders. However, this boom in shōkonsha would soon come to an end as, by the early 1870s, the state had already begun to formalize the shrines into a bureaucratic system.

In their book outlining the history of the establishment of the shōkonsha system,

Kobayashi Kenzō and Terunuma Yoshibumi argue that there are three stages to its development.86 The first stage from 1868-1870 marks the rapid spread of shōkonsha across the country following the end of the Boshin War. The second stage from 1871-1876 was when the state began to institute a formal structure regarding the classification and funding of the shōkonsha. Finally, the third stage from 1877-1879 denotes how the shōkonsha became tied to the nation-building project of the state. This breakdown into stages is helpful in understanding the emergence of the shōkonsha within State Shinto as well. Particularly since the shōkonsha were being given financial support at a time when other Shinto shrines were losing their official

86 Kobayashi Kenzō and Terunuma Yoshibumi, Shōkonsha Seiritsu shi no Kenkyū (Tokyo: Kinseisha, 1969), 69-70.

53 status and being defunded.87 Since I have already outlined what happened during the first stage of growth, I will move directly to the second stage as determined by Kobayashi and Terunuma.

The second stage from 1871-1876 was shadowed by the creation of the Ministry of

Religious Education (kyōbushō) which was only in existence from 1872-1877. This government initiative was the successor to the Department of Divinities (Jingikan), which was designed to administrate only Shinto shrines but quickly became a failed policy of the Meiji state. On the other hand, the Ministry of Religious Education was geared towards being more inclusive of other religious beliefs. Nonetheless, Shinto continued to be favoured by the government and in

1873, it set up the Centre for Great Learning (Taikyōin) in Tokyo to assist in religious instruction across the nation. As a guideline to mobilize religious groups, it proscribed three rules for religious teaching (sanjyō kyōsoku, also known as the sanjyō kyōken): first, to honour god and country; second, to act based on the laws of nature and humanity (tenri jindō); third, to create a nation centred on the emperor. These three rules sought to tie religious ritual to both the nation and the state and would help do the groundwork for the ‘non-religious’ status of Shinto shrines in the later Meiji period. As early as 1882, traditional Shinto shrines were distinguished from

Sectarian Shinto as being ‘non-religious’ since the latter shrines took up the duties of moral instruction.88 By giving Shinto shrines a patriotic nature, it placed them above a simple religious function, which is why they continued to receive special status even after the 1889 Constitution

87 In 1879 the government began to defund a lot of the minor people’s shrines (minsha) which was a reflection of the 1870s and 1880s when Shinto shrines experienced stagnation. See Wilbur M. Fridell, Japanese Shrine Mergers 1906-1912: State Shinto Moves to the Grassroots (Tokyo: The Kawata Press, 1973), 1. 88 This point is made by Fridell. Ibid., 2-3.

54 which entrenched the ideal of freedom of religious belief.89 The shōkonsha certainly fall into this category of being ‘non-religious’ as they were not generally used for official religious instruction. It also explains why they are generally categorized as shrines with special status during the Meiji period and don’t get formally brought into the shrine system until 1939.

The first attempt to incorporate the shōkonsha into the shrine system was made on

November 9, 1873. On this day, a communication from the Finance Ministry announced that they would collect information on all shōkonsha90 that participated in the enshrinement of the spirits of the dead during the Meiji Restoration. The aim was to categorize these shrines by looking at the size of the land plots, the method of construction of any structures, and any other characteristics that would help make the term shōkonsha more legible to the state. The following month, they released a list of twenty-seven shōkonsha that were now legally under state administration. This meant that the shrine land was exempted from taxes and that each shrine received financial support from the state in the form of an annual stipend. The twenty-seven shrines represented eighteen prefectures across the country from Kumamoto to Akita and were all used to enshrine martyrs (jun’nansha) who died from the 1850s until the end of the Boshin

War. Absent from this list was the Tokyo Shōkonsha. As early as 1873, it seems that the Tokyo

Shōkonsha would be given special treatment in relation to the other shōkonsha as the government suggested that it would continue to be used for those who died after the

89 Article 28 of the 1889 Constitution states: “Japanese subjects shall, within limits not prejudicial to peace and order, and not antagonistic to their duties as subjects, enjoy freedom of religious belief.” 90 The official word used here is shōkonjyō denoting that it was a place that was used for the ‘invocation of the spirits’ ceremonies but did not actually constitute a shrine. This distinction is common until the mid-1870s when the shrines that receive state recognition (and having a permanent shrine-like structure was probably a major component to receiving recognition) are then referred to as shōkonsha. For the sake of consistency and to aid those who do not read Japanese I have simply used the term shōkonsha to refer to both even when the primary source uses shōkonjyō.

55 restoration.91 Two years later, in 1875, another government directive announced that the stipend for the shōkonsha would total 51 yen and 25 sen of which 20 yen was given for the performing of rituals (saishi) while the rest would be used for maintenance costs such as cleaning.92

The final stage of the establishment of a shōkonsha system occurred from 1877-1879.

During this period, we can observe the formal emergence of the Tokyo Shōkonsha as the national shrine dedicated to the war dead. In 1879, it was renamed Yasukuni Shrine, meaning

‘pacifying the nation’, and was given the rank of an Imperial Shrine of Special Status (bekkaku kanpeisha) which meant it now received support directly from the Imperial Household. But what really signifies this final period was the Seinan War in 1877. This civil war between the samurai of Satsuma led by Saigō Takamori and the Imperial forces was the result of two divergent views of how the post-Restoration state should be constituted.93 While Saigō’s direct spurn from the government regarding his stance on invading Korea was certainly part of his dissatisfaction, for the other samurai who joined in his cause, it was the constant attacks on the status of the warrior class that led to their aversion for the state. Following the official dissolution of the former class system in 1871, the adoption of universal conscription in 1873 further infuriated the samurai as now their skills and services were discarded. While Saigō’s attempt to counter conscription by opening his own military academy eventually drew a reaction by the state, the decision to

91 This point is made by Kobayashi and Terunuma, 70. 92 Daijyōkan No. 67, April 24, 1875. 93 This division could even be drawn between the leadership of the former Chōshū and Satsuma han since they took up opposing positions through the 1860s regarding the question of foreign influence. While Chōshū championed the “revere the emperor, expel the foreigner” (sonnō jōi) slogan, Satsuma and Aizu han stood on the side of the unity of court and Shoganate (kōbu gattai) which generally took an open stance to relations with foreign countries. As Banno Junji argues, it was Saigō who brought these two camps together by shelving the foreigner question and instead focussing on the “revere the emperor” position in order to shift political power away from the bakufu. After the Kinmon Incident in 1864, his focus shifted to creating a multi-party alliance that would put pressure on the bakufu to secede power to the Imperial Court. Banno Junji, Nihon Kindaishi (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2012), 19-20.

56 discontinue stipends by the government in 1876 provided another blow in an already volatile situation. The Seinan War was the last of a number of samurai rebellions that pitted the former warrior class against the newly conscripted troops which presented a very different take on class warfare. Thus this historical juncture produced a different milieu in regards to the war dead in comparison to only a decade earlier when the same Satsuma samurai fought the bakufu on the side of the imperial regime. As Kobayashi Kenzō and Terunuma Yoshibumi write:

First there is the issue of changing the name of the Tokyo Shōkonsha to the rank of an Imperial Shrine of Special Status. On the other hand, starting with the Advocacy of a Punitive Expedition to Korea Debate (Seikan Ron) of 1873, we need to pay attention to the many successive domestic incidents—the Saga Rebellion, Shinpūren Rebellion, Seinan War, etc.—that happened in the background which altered such a system. In other words, when we consider the biggest cause of this change, first we need to think about the nature of those enshrined at the shōkonsha while they were still alive (matsurareta kamigami no seizen no seikaku). To be specific, there is a big difference between the disposition of those who fought as soldiers during the Meiji Restoration and those who, after the proclamation of Universal Conscription in 1873, participated in the various domestic incidents. In the case of the former, the clan soldiers reported to their old feudal lords whereas in the latter case they were the Emperor’s own Imperial Guard (shinpei), the army, which would naturally produce a different disposition. Therefore, it would be best to view the nature of the shōkonsha after the Seinan War as being much more loaded with a national meaning than it was before.94

If anything, the circumstances of Saigō Takamori make this point even clearer. Despite having garnered so much respect and admiration for his military acumen during the Boshin War, because he fought and died against the imperial forces in 1877, he was never enshrined at

Yasukuni. While Saigō and the other samurai saw their actions as supporting the underlying

94 Kobayashi and Terunuma, 77. Immediately following the Proclamation of Universal Conscription in 1873, the standing army was known as the Imperial Guard (shinpei). This changed in 1891 when the Japanese Imperial Guard (Konoe Shidan) was created in order to protect the Emperor, the Imperial House and Imperial properties.

57 ideology of the imperial court, and thus in line with their idea of the restoration, their actions constituted an attack on the state.

From 1879 onwards, Yasukuni Shrine would become further entrenched into the culture of Meiji Japan because of its elevated status within the shrine system. Not only did this result in more visitors from across the nation but the shrine also took on a more visible presence appearing in elementary school textbooks, travel guides, and in photo collections. In schools across the country, students were introduced to the shrine by way of songs95, grammar lessons,96 and even school excursion guides.97 Even a writing practice book for first and second year elementary students contained a brief history of the shrine and its festivals with the title of

“Invite a friend to the Shōkonsai.”98 In 1894, an illustrated book for kids about stories of

Tokyo’s history (Tokyo-fu shidan) included a brief history of the shrine as well as a description of the plum and cherry trees, which it stated were famous with the public during spring.99 For the international crowd there were also two bilingual books that featured pieces on Yasukuni Shrine.

One was a picture book of Japan’s beautiful sights (shikishima bikan) from 1905 and the other an

1887 English-Japanese conversation book which I will return to in the final section of this chapter.

95 The shrine is prominent in a collection of songs for elementary students. Yasukuni Jinja Hyakunenshi, vol. 4, 129. 96 A 1910 Kokugo textbook for elementary students used a reading about the history of the shrine to illustrate sentence structure. 97 It featured in a 1900 ‘My Elementary School Trip Outing Companion’ (shogakkoyō shūgakuryokō ensoku no tomo) book. 98 Kokutei kyōkasho Ouyō: Sakubun Renshū sho (Tokyo: Sūzandō, 1905), 11. 99 Yamazaki Hikohachi, Tokyo-fu Shidan (Tokyo: Hakubunkan, 1884), 28-29.

The conceived space of the shrine was carefully articulated by the state through the construction of the shrine system, the Army and Navy Ministries, and then propagated through religious education, public announcements in newspapers and the education system. However, it was not until after the Sino-Japanese War that what is now sometimes referred to as the

‘Yasukuni Doctrine’ began to receive scholarly attention. Takahashi Tetsuya states that the concept of the Yasukuni Doctrine first appeared in the Jiji Shinpō on November 14, 1895, in an article titled, ‘We Should Hold a Grand Ceremony for the War Dead.’100 The article argues that, in contrast to the glory showered on the returning soldiers, the war dead and their bereaved families were shown no appreciation for their sacrifice and were forgotten by society. It concluded that they too should be given the highest honour possible so that they could participate in the celebration of victory and share a sense of national pride. As quoted from the Jiji Shinpō:

In the unfortunate event that war breaks out, who should we rely on to defend our country? Since we have no other choice than to rely on the courageous, fearless souls that dare to confront death, to cultivate this spirit is the most urgent task for the defence of our country. To foster such a spirit, as much honour as possible should be given to the war dead and bereaved families so that people would never fail to feel a sense of happiness about falling on the battlefield.101

From this point onwards, Yasukuni Shrine was considered to be an important tool for state war propaganda and fostering a patriotic zeal for sacrificing one’s life for the empire. In the same way that the Seinan War marked a change from the disposition of those who died in the Boshin

War, the Sino-Japanese War from 1894-95 now enshrined those who were casualties of Japan’s

100 Tetsuya Takahashi, “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine”, trans. by Philip Seaton, Nationalisms in Japan, ed. Naoko Shimazu (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006), 168. 101 Hiroshi Hirayama, Fukuzawa Yukichi no shinjitsu (Tokyo: Bunshun shinsho, 2004), as cited in Takahashi, “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine,” in Nationalisms in Japan, edited by Naoko Shimazu (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006), 170.

59 foreign wars and its shift to more imperialist policies.102 Thus this moment marks a final shift in the conceived space of the shrine as it follows Japan’s projection outside of its national borders and opens up the possibility for rituals performed at Yasukuni to include bodies of different races within the space of the Japanese Empire.

By the 1900s, Yasukuni Shrine would have been a familiar place for Japanese people of all ages. Although most people would have been able to repeat the state narrative of the shrine as a national memorial for those who died to restore the emperor, what people thought about

Yasukuni would have been different depending on where they lived. For those who lived far away from the capital and never had the chance to visit and experience the space of the shrine for themselves, the state narrative would have been their only way to conceive of that space.

However, those who entered into the physical space of the shrine—especially for those who called Tokyo home—would have known a very different Yasukuni.

1.4 Spaces of Representation and Everyday Life at the Shrine

The perceived space of the shrine produced an idea of Yasukuni that was largely dependent on its environment particularly due to its location on top of Kudan Hill. On the other hand, Yasukuni Shrine as a conceived space relied heavily on detaching itself from its physical surroundings and instead forming a discursive space complete with material representations of the narrative that the state had constructed concerning the shrine. Lefebvre’s final triadic node

102 This follows the shift in the economy to a second stage (1890-1910) where the war boom resulted in a demand for factory production and the growth of heavy industries.

60 regarding the production of space is how the experience of that space can act as a bridge between the perceived and conceived elements but at the same time it holds the possibility of revealing their constructed nature through contradictions found in the everyday. It is these contradictions that I want to bring to the forefront as I argue that the emergence of a capitalist economy and the social relations produced by it can be used to interrupt the discourse of the state’s narrative regarding Yasukuni Shrine. In line with the other spatial movements that I have been tracing in this chapter, this final movement is found in the movement to a commodity economy that had emerged during the Tokugawa period and during the early Meiji became the dominant mode of exchange. The spatial aspect of this movement has a physical component in that the circulation of commodities gives itself over to the process of urbanization as a social phenomenon. It also has an abstract component since out of the exchange process this “circulation sweats money from every pore.”103 Thus money mediates not only the process of exchange but also the physical and abstract nature of the spatial geography of the circulation of commodities. After all, to use the words of David Harvey, money is “the most geographically mobile asset.”104 The necessity that money mediates these exchanges is important for understanding how the occurrence of crime at

Yasukuni Shrine was a product of the shift to a commodity economy.

Conceived space transcends the everyday infusing the shrine with heroes and a unified, continuous movement that makes state ideology so powerful. In this way, conceived space is always outside of the actual space itself as these stories and acts of heroism derive from battlefields often far away from Kudan Hill. If the buildings and rituals that give shape to the

103 Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 208. The concept of alienation is important here for how Marx follows how labour power becomes abstracted through the medium of money (a wage) which alienates the labourer from the products of his labour. For further reading see Karl Marx, “Estranged Labour,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. 104 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 151.

61 state ideology of Yasukuni interpellates us with the narrative of brave soldiers giving their lives for the emperor and nation, it is because the everyday is also a product of conceived space

(forms). But there is always a residual remainder that cannot be captured since even the power of the state cannot completely organize the everyday. According to Lefebvre, these residual deposits “reveal the inability of forms to grasp content.”105 That is why the lived experience of a space can cut and disrupt grand narratives breaking their hold on us since these narratives cannot resolve the internal contradictions that are present in everyday life. The immediacy of experiencing a space can also produce a distance from the object allowing us to observe its strangeness. Lefebvre argues that it is through the everyday (its incoherence and disjuncture) that we can be liberated by becoming conscious of our alienation.106

At the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned Kotkin’s methodology of trying to reconcile the gap between the state’s ambition to construct an ideological space and how people experienced that space. Now that I have presented how Yasukuni as a conceived space produced a discourse that connects the shrine to the state and nation through the figure of the emperor, I want to focus on how that space was then experienced through the everyday. Naturally there is a part of the everyday that falls into the realm of conceived space as the shrine cannot escape the meaning and physical structure that the state has attributed to it. Thus I will begin my discussion of the everyday from the position of the state by looking at the rituals and labour that is performed by the priests whose bodies routinely fill and give content to the space of Yasukuni shrine. However, while their role in producing the space of Yasukuni is important, we need to

105 Lefebvre, CEL, Vol. 2, 64. 106 Lefebvre explains this using Brecht’s plays to show how he grasped alienation through art in opposition to the classical plays of his period. CEL, Vol.1, 20-25.

62 remember that the rituals that they perform were not designed to be consumed by the general public during the Meiji period. This does not mean that the gaze of state power had no effect on those who flocked to Yasukuni Shrine as argued by Murakami Shigeyoshi, Ōe Shinobu, and

Akiko Takenaka. As Takashi Fujitani has pointed out, the visual domination of state pageantry especially since it centred on the figure of the emperor acted to produce a disciplinary society that “facilitated the production of the nation-state as a bordered space of visibility within which the people could imagine themselves as objects of observation.”107 This disciplinary gaze had a powerful impact in creating a modern consciousness that was necessary for mobilizing the masses. What I am suggesting is that the everyday experience of those who entered the space of

Yasukuni Shrine was not limited to disciplining subjects in seeing themselves as a national community under a state monarch. Ideology is not that clean cut and precise to not also simultaneously produce remainders—even those that might counter the gaze of state power.

Thus I will focus on the lived experience at the shrine through the framework of contradictions in order to observe how the everyday cannot fully be organized by state power. In order to reposition the agency of those who experienced the space of the shrine I will use newspaper reports, firsthand accounts and shrine documents to cut through the state narrative of Yasukuni in order to see what remainders can uncovered.

Before going into the everyday life of the priests at Yasukuni, I want to briefly give some background to how these priests were first selected to serve at the shrine. In the fall of 1869, four months after the first festival was held at the Tokyo Shōkonsha, the process of selecting priests who would permanently serve at the shrine began. Following the suggestion of Ōmura Masujirō,

107 Takashi Fujitani, Splendid Monarchy: power and pageantry in modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 25.

63 sixty-two priests were selected to begin training at the shrine.108 These men were selected from the Hōkoku Corps and the Sekishin Corps, which were groups of Shinto priests who formed special military forces to fight in the Boshin War.109 As part of their training at the Tokyo

Shōkonsha, they read the Japanese classics and in preparation for the festivals they divided their labour into different administrative sections such as music, management and clerical work. In

July of 1871, a new group of 39 priests were brought in to oversee the construction of the inner sanctuary (honden), which was completed in 1872. The first chief priest was Sugiura Daigaku

(1830-1873) who was the second-born son of Kanroji Nagunara (1771-1837), a member of the

Imperial Court (kugyō) in Kyoto. He was adopted by the Sugiura family who operated the Suwa

Shrine in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka. During the Boshin War, he became leader of the Enshu Hōkoku

Corps before being appointed to be one of the shrine’s watchmen (gobanjin) and finally chief priest in 1871. At this time, it was also decided that only six priests would receive a government allowance as a salary.110

The shrine was originally managed through the Ministry of Military Affairs (Hyōbushō) and then through the Ministry of War after 1872. The salaries were paid by the state and varied

108 At this point Ōmura had already received multiple stab wounds from an assassination attempt in Kyoto by disgruntled samurai of the sonnō jōi faction on September 9. He would die of his wounds two months later on November 5, 1869. 109 They would have belonged to families with a long lineage of service as the priesthood had generally turned into a hereditary position. The decision to divest of Shinto nepotism was made in 1871. One concern was that the practice had permeated Shintoism so deeply that there was a strong disconnect between the priesthood and the common layman to the extent that the priests constituted their own class. Jean Herbert, Shinto at the Fountain-head of Japan (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1967), 50. Akiko Takenaka argues that it was not until 1879 when the Tokyo Shōkonsha was renamed Yasukuni Shrine that it became overtly connected to Shintoism but I believe the use of these Shinto priests from 1869 shows that from the beginning it was shaped by Shinto thought regardless whether the state recognized it officially as a Shinto shrine. See Takenaka, 47-50. 110 Yasukuni Jinja shi, 171. The number of salaried priests occasionally changed such as in 1873 when there were only five priests on salary until 1879 when it moved back to six. In 1891 two of the shrine official positions were discarded but were later reinstated in 1910.

64 by position as the chief priest (gūji) received 10 yen a month, while one senior priest (negi) received 8 yen. The other four shrine officials (shuten) each received 6 yen a month. In 1879, after the shrine was renamed and given the rank of Imperial Shrine of Special Status the grand minister of state, Sanjō Sanetomi (1837-1891) permitted a salary raise to the top two ranks bringing their monthly salary to 30 yen and 17 yen, respectively. At this time, it was decided that the Home Ministry would have the final word on the movement of priests (shinkan no shintai) while the Army Ministry and Navy Ministry would assist on decisions regarding the increasing of staff and salaries.111 By 1889, all decisions regarding priests at Yasukuni Shrine were made by only the Army and Navy Ministries and by 1902 the position of the head priest was appointed by the cabinet with the approval of the emperor. By the end of the Meiji period, the chief priest earned between 40-50 yen a month, while two senior priests made between 25-35 yen, and the three shrine officials received 10-25 yen.112

The everyday life of the priests was structured around the performance of rituals and clerical work. In the morning, the offerings of food and sake (shinsen) were made in the inner sanctuary prior to the gathering of all the priests to pay homage (sanpai) to the war dead. During this morning ceremony, large drums (ōdaiko) were played during the reciting of the purification rites (ōharae) and usually the reciting of a poem, which was written by the emperor or another member of the imperial household. After the morning ceremonies, the priests would attend to the shrine grounds before lunch. In the afternoon, it was time for clerical work and preparations for

111 Ibid., 172. 112 Ibid., 176. This was not exactly a large sum of money at the time but it would have been higher than someone doing manual labour. For example, a male labourer at one of the government operated Naval Arsenals near Tokyo would have received a monthly wage of 24 yen while the Prime Minister might have received somewhere around 900 yen a month.

65 the many events on the Shinto calendar. Finally in the early evening, food and sake were once again offered to the gods. This formalized structure to the everyday is what made Yasukuni

Shrine legible to the state through things like budgets, personnel decisions, bureaucratic records, and the logistics of planning festivities. Although these mundane tasks tend to fall out of the picture when Yasukuni is discussed in terms of the emperor system or the war dead, it is the activities of the everyday that gives these ideas the possibility to take form. And this routine of the priests also helps support and gives content to the state narrative of the shrine as it is observed from those who pass through the shrine grounds.

Tayama Katai’s memoirs reveal exactly how the discourse of war heroes interpellated a young boy who spent his days wandering aimlessly around the shrine.

The shrine grounds were still quiet in those days. The cherry trees had only just been planted and were still small. The bronze statue of Ōmura stood all alone, except for the huge ungainly iron tori that towered overhead and looked completely out of place. I used to pass through the grounds morning and evening. Now [that] I think back I can remember it all in great detail. Every day I’d walk along the stones at the foot of the wall to the left of the main building, sometimes with my younger brother, sometimes alone.

I always seemed to hear a voice within me: “You’ll soon become famous! You HAVE to become famous!” As I walked along the stone steps I always thought about heroes and greatness. The spirit of my father, who had given his life for his country, seemed so close to me at that point.113

Through Tayama’s memories of Yasukuni we can see how the structure of the everyday shapes how space is experienced. While Tayama’s relation with the shrine is unique in that he would have been one of very few people who had a relative enshrined there at this time, it is interesting that most of his reminiscing does not involve much about his father. Yet we can see how the

113 Tayama, 90-91.

66 narrative of death and heroism gives meaning to a space even while a boy is simply wandering around bored.

Despite our desire to take such memories of Yasukuni and make them representative of how the shrine was perceived, the fact that the state cannot structure everyday life completely also needs to be taken into account. In other words, form cannot fully capture content and thus we are left with remainders that remind us that the contingency of the everyday holds the power to be disruptive. As an example of the gap between form and content I want to examine a short unedited excerpt from an 1887 English-Japanese conversation book:

Did you go to shiokonsha? Yes. Why? To see the horse races. From what time did the horse races begin, commonly? About twelve oclock. Was the Emperor present on to see the races? No. What do you mean by Shiokonsha? It means a inviting soul temple. Why are the horse races held at Shiokonsha? In memory of the battle of Seinan. Who was the battle fought between? Between a government and Saigo. What was the cause of the battle? It was cause by the discussion of the question between Japan and Corea.114

From the sample dialogue, we can see how certain aspects of the state narrative are present and yet from the very beginning it is evident that an alternative narrative is taking shape. The reason that this person goes to the shōkonsha in the first place has nothing to do with reverence for the dead or even the emperor. Instead they are going there to be entertained by the horse races meaning that this was probably during one of the annual festivals. Even though this person is

114 Conversation of English and Japanese (Tokyo: Meishindo, 1887), 89-91.

67 aware of the history and meaning of the shōkonsha, the state narrative still cannot capture their desires—although, as we shall see in the next chapter, the horse races played an important role in the economy of Yasukuni and the formation of subjects of capital. Another way to observe how these remainders elude and can break down the state narrative of Yasukuni is by looking at incidences of crime which were rather common on the shrine grounds.

Besides the announcements of the annual festivals, crimes were the most frequent reason for Yasukuni Shrine to be mentioned in the Yomiuri Shinbun during the Meiji period. In total, there were 54 reports of crimes or incidences between 1876 and 1912. While most of these were minor offences, other more violent crimes such as sexual assaults and attempted murders also occurred. Petty theft was particularly a problem throughout the 1880s as 10 out of the 14 crimes reported involved theft. Sometimes this involved the theft of property from the shrine grounds like in January 1881 when some lamps and a temporary door where removed.115 More commonly, it was personal items that were stolen like articles of clothing (formal coats, kimonos, jackets, etc.), western-style umbrellas, tobacco pouches, wallets or small change. The annual festivals in particular were renowned for pickpockets and in May of 1887 a 23 year old was caught having stolen over fifty items in one day.116 There was also a story of a man who reported having had his wallet stolen from his cart while watching the horse races during the fall festival in 1882.117 Despite these crimes, it seems that no immediate action was taken by the state to make the shrine grounds a safer place until after a confrontation between the police and a thief erupted into a fight (ōtachimawari), which left the officer slightly wounded in August of

115 Yomiuri Shinbun, February 6, 1881, morning edition page 1. 116 Yomiuri Shinbun, May 8, 1887, morning edition page 2. 117 Yomiuri Shinbun, November 9, 1882, morning edition page 2.

1903. Two months later, a police box (junsa hashutsujo) was built onsite and staffed by two officers.118 Four years later the military police took over and continued to guard the shrine grounds until the American Occupation. While Yasukuni Shrine is not unique in being a space where crimes were committed, I want to connect how these crimes relate to the everyday and the state narrative of the shrine in order to show how the dominant narrative of Yasukuni Shrine was constantly being contested.

The evolution of law in Meiji Japan had already reached a second phase with the Penal

Code (Keihō) of 1880.119 Leading up to this point the state had previously promulgated three penal codes: the Provisional Penal Code (kari Keiritsu, 1868), the Outlines of the New Code

(Shinritsu Kōryō, 1870), and the Amended Criminal Regulations (Kaitei Ritsurei, 1873).120 To a large extent, they were continuations of Tokugawa practices that were still based on feudal social stratifications and yet an attempt was made to bridge the gap between feudal practices and what

Meiji bureaucrats had already learned of European penal codes. Throughout the 1870s, the

Ministry of Justice, specifically under the leadership of Etō Shinpei (1834-1874), embarked on translating foreign penal codes into Japanese. The first works to come out of this project were the translations of the French Criminal Code, Civil Code, and the Napoleonic Codes which were completed by 1873. This along with the assistance of the French legal scholar, Gustave

Boissonade (1825-1910), resulted in the drafting of the Penal Code of 1880.

118 Yasukuni Jinjya Hyakunenshi, vol. 4, 160. 119 It is now referred to as the Old Penal Code (Kyūkeihō) after 1907 when a new Penal Code was enacted. The old Penal Code was announced by Daijyōkan decree No. 36 and was enacted on July 17, 1880. The code contained 430 articles (in comparison the Canadian Criminal Code of 1892 contained 983 articles) and was not enforced until January 1, 1882. 120 The Amended Criminal Regulations of 1873 was the first code to introduce imprisonment in lieu of corporal punishment, forced labour or deportation. A fourth code, the Draft of Statutes and Substatutes as Revised (Kosei Ritsurei Ko), was never promulgated.

Included in the 1880 Code were two key reforms that dramatically shifted how the law would be implemented as well as how punishment would be dispersed. In regards to the implementation of the law, the new penal code stated that all would be equal before the law and, in regards to punishment, that guilt would be placed on the individual as opposed to being collectively adjudicated.121 Both of these reforms had direct implications on the issue of crime at

Yasukuni Shrine. First, equality before the law meant that the higher social classes no longer received lighter punishments or escaped punishment altogether, which was common during the

Edo period. As an ideal, equality before the law should be applauded, however, in practice and especially in terms of the crimes on the shrine grounds the stratification of classes was still evident. In almost all of the crimes involving theft discussed above, it was a young person stealing something of value from another festival participant. This is because Yasukuni Shrine was a space that facilitated the exchange of commodities which was mediated by money meaning that thieves knew people would have money in their possession. Given the stature of the festivals and the attendance of high-profile politicians and military generals as well as the occasional appearance by members of the royal family, thieves could also count on stealing items of value that could later be turned into money. So even though the law touted equality, the economic inequalities between social classes still resulted in the criminalization of the lower class much like it did during the Edo period. If we recall how the perceived space of the shrine placed it in the intermundia between the high-city and low-city where people of all social classes were supposed to mix and form a sense of national identity, the everyday presented through criminal acts on the shrine grounds cuts through that discourse. Due to the reporting of these crimes in newspapers, those who entered the space of Yasukuni Shrine must have been well

121 For more on the historical development of Japanese law see Meryll Dean, Japanese Legal System, second edition (London: Cavendish Publishing Limited, 2002).

70 aware of the class divisions and the subsequent danger of flaunting such divisions in public space.

The second major reform that derived from the Penal Code of 1880 was that guilt was now individualized. Under the Tokugawa government, guilt was seen as a collective responsibility which meant that punishments were also collectively dispersed. This responsibility could spread to one’s immediate family, acquaintances or even to the whole village. By instituting personal guilt into the penal code, the law sought to further interpellate the individual by entering into their psyche in order to determine intent (mens rea). While the objective initially might have been to protect the collective from social dangers as a “sort of public hygiene,” it also reorganized the place of the collective in relation to the state as simply a population that needed to be individuated to produce statistical knowledge.122 This move away from the collective was not limited to the realm of law alone but was the product of a general transformation in social relations centered on the individual which found its strongest proponents in the neoclassical economist’s figure of ‘homo economicus’. In contrast to the state narrative of the shrine in which the war dead are collectively enshrined and remembered, the experience of crime at Yasukuni along with the presence of the police makes visible the contradictions between that narrative and the everyday life of the individuated, responsible subject of the law. The collective project of producing a narrative of the war dead that crosses space and time is then countered by the legal shift to place guilt and responsibility on the individual.123

122 Michel Foucault, “About the Concept of the ‘Dangerous Individual’ in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry,” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Vol. 1 (February 1978), 6. 123 This question of guilt and its relation to the collective versus the individual would also become a problem in the postwar as the new constitution once again emphasized the need for individual guilt as a way to fight against the ‘dangers’ of the collective. For more on the post-war subjectivity (shutaisei) debate see Victor Koschmann’s Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan as well as the film Death by Hanging (Kōshikei) by Oshima Nagisa.

By examining all three aspects of the production of space at Yasukuni we can see how the shrine was more than simply an institution for nation-building or as an instrument for propagating state ideology. The shrine as a perceived space showed us how the placing of

Yasukuni on Kudan Hill proved to be an important factor in how that space was grasped through the senses. The topography of Tokyo also factored into how the shrine was perceived as it was built on a prominent location situated above the low-city. The image of the shrine bridging the high and low parts of the city is particularly poignant and fits easily into the narrative of it as a space for nation-building. The conceived space of the shrine shares in this ease of appropriating state ideology for the production of space. The rituals, pageantry and imperial symbols all point to the presence of the state which has shaped how we think of Yasukuni to this day. The priests who were employed at the shrine contributed to the formation of state ideology as they were the primary bodies that filled the space of the shrine and helped produce a certain ambiance to the everyday. However, through an investigation of the everyday life at the shrine, in particular the criminal activity that took place on the shrine grounds, the narratives that are a product of perceived and conceived space can be disrupted. So although state ideology interpellated those who entered the space of Yasukuni we need to remember that not only does such an approach begin and end from the position of the state, thus making it difficult to see the space of Yasukuni as a product of something other than the state, but that it also does not account for the remainders that the state cannot control. For those who experienced this space during the Meiji period, it was far more likely that the residual deposits found in the everyday would have challenged these state narratives producing various contradictions. Thus I suggest that Yasukuni Shrine, specifically during the Meiji period, should be observed as a contested space long before the arrival of the postwar ‘Yasukuni Issue’ debate.

In conclusion, I want to briefly return to the story of Wada Kōnosuke and his unfortunate circumstances that led him to abandon his child. While it is impossible to know his intentions, it now makes sense that he chose Yasukuni as the scene of the crime as that space represented what had gone wrong with his own life. The formation of a national community meant that feudal class divisions had to be formally disbanded including the dissolution of the military class. As a result, this had an immediate implication on the lives of samurai as it changed how they related to the state. Their material survival which was guaranteed by the state through an annual stipend of rice was now commuted into a small financial sum for those in the lower ranks. Now the only way that samurai could guarantee their material well-being was through the marketplace and the exchange of commodities. After 1877, it is easy to see how Yasukuni Shrine for many might have been a symbol of betrayal. I imagine that Wada might have even been cheering on Saigō and the other rebelling samurai in their attempt to restore the social status of the warrior class.

Fifteen months after baby Yasuji made headlines by being abandoned, he was in the newspaper once again. This time the article pointed out that his adopted father had decided to put the two yen per month grant given to him for child-rearing costs by the government in a bank so that when Yasuji came of age he would be able to begin his life on the right track.124 And thus the story comes full circle as this anecdote of the paternal state helps to close down the potential of the everyday to disrupt our understanding of the space of Yasukuni Shrine by reinforcing the narrative of the Meiji state.

Of course, crime is not the only break in the everyday at Yasukuni. The annual festivals at the shrine not only broke up the calendar of ritual cycles (nenjū gyōji) but they also

124 It would seem that Yasuji would be a very wealthy man as the account already had 245 yen in it by June 1884.

73 transformed the mundane, everyday business of the shrine into a carnivalesque atmosphere.

Much like the other contradictions that Lefebvre saw as products of the everyday, the festival stood in opposition to everyday life. However, he warns that, even though “festivals contrasted violently with everyday life”, it would be wrong to think that they are disconnected.125 If the festival is an explosion of excesses that breaks down the social structures that repressed certain desires, it is only because these desires accumulated and came to a boiling point through the mundane, repetition of the everyday. Thus, while the festival has a cultural component that facilitates communal solidarity through the pretense of religious practices, it also contains the potential to disrupt state power. Or, as John Nelson writes, the “matsuri can build in intensity until the mental boundaries that keep it contained as an illusion diminish and a profound sense of reality is imparted to those involved.”126 In the next chapter, I will turn to the festival in order to further push the boundaries of thought regarding Yasukuni through examining entertainment on the shrine grounds. By connecting entertainment to the shrine’s political economy, I hope to continue to unravel how the Yasukuni Shrine is at the nexus of Capital-Nation-State.

125 Lefebvre, CEL vol.1, 207. 126 John K. Nelson, Enduring Identities: The Guise of Shinto in Contemporary Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 173.

Chapter 2 Festival, Exchange, and the Political Economy of Yasukuni Shrine

The feast is an important primary form of human culture. It cannot be explained merely by the practical condition of the community’s work, and it would be even more superficial to attribute it to the physiological demand for periodic rest. The feast had always an essential, meaningful philosophical content. No rest period or breathing spell can be rendered festive per se; something must be added from the spiritual and ideological dimension. They must be sanctioned not by the world of practical conditions but by the highest aims of human existence, that is, by the world of ideals…. They were the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance.

--Mikhail Bakhtin127

The Greek agora establishes a formal typology, the Roman Forum defines the symbolism of the square as a center of an architecture and a society essentially urban. While the Greek agora contributed to giving the citizen self- consciousness, the Roman Forum made him aware of the state.

--Juan Carlos Pérgolis128

The epigraphs above touch on two themes that will be examined in relation to Yasukuni

Shrine: the festival and the shrine as a social space. Festivals at Yasukuni were annual events that originally marked the anniversaries of major battles won by the imperial army during the

Boshin War.129 Generally lasting from three to five days, the festivals had a jovial atmosphere

127 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1984), 8-9. 128 Juan Carlos Pérgolis, La Plaza: El centro de la Ciudad, translated by Carlos Zeballos (Bogota: Catholic University of Columbia, 2002), 22. 129 In the first year of the shrine, there were four major festivals that took place in July, September, January and May, however, in the following years the festival dates varied from year to year. From 1872, there were generally three festivals per year in January, May, and September (although from 1873 the September festival was moved to November) with the exception of 1877 when there were four festivals (January, July, September, and November). By the tenth anniversary of the shrine the number of festivals had dwindled down to two, in May and November. Yasukuni Jinja Shi, 64.

75 and attracted large crowds throughout the Meiji period.130 Fireworks, sumo, noh performances, horse races, freak shows, and the occasional European circus contributed to the celebratory nature of these events and were important in shaping the early history of the shrine. To this extent, the festivals and the entertainment that flooded the shrine grounds have been discussed by many scholars of Yasukuni Shrine as a spectacle that functioned to attract crowds who would then be captured by the ideological narrative of the state.131 My own approach will diverge from previous scholarship by focussing on the structural necessity of entertainment for the shrine’s political economy as well as the role of entertainment in the spatial organization of the shrine grounds.

Most theorists of the festival from Bakhtin, Lefebvre, and Georges Bataille tend to focus on its temporality as it interrupts everyday rhythms giving it a disruptive and thus revolutionary potential.132 This revolutionary character of the festival is what Bakhtin focussed on in his reading of Rabelais’ festival as it accentuated a type of politics that stood in opposition to the everyday in both form and content. However, when reading the archival accounts of festivals at

Yasukuni, it is difficult to arrive at a similar conclusion regarding their revolutionary potential.

Although at times the carnivalesque atmosphere as described by Bakhtin, or Bataille and

Lefebvre can be observed, the form of the festival itself makes it almost impossible to imagine

130 As early as 1869, Saitō Gesshin records that lots of people attended the September festival. Saitō Gesshin, Buko Nenpyo vol. 2, edited by Kaneko Mitsuharu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1968), 229. 131 Kobori Keiichirō (1998) is one Japanese scholar who holds this position, which is reiterated by John Breen (2008 and 2014). Also, see the work of John Nelson (2003) who links the historical presence of entertainment at Yasukuni with other shrines and, most recently, Akiko Takenaka (2015) dedicates a full chapter to entertainment at the shrine as spectacle. Although Takenaka also emphasizes the gap between the state narrative and how the space of Yasukuni was experienced by everyday people she ultimately concludes that entertainment functioned to prop up state ideology. 132 Bakhtin writes that “the feast is always essentially related to time, either to the recurrence of an event in the natural (cosmic) cycle, or to biological or historic timeliness.” Bakhtin, Rabelais, 9.

Yasukuni as a revolutionary space. This is because the festivals were never meant to be a time to enter into a “utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” as Bakhtin writes.133 Rather the festival was a carefully organized and orchestrated performance by the state that retained the class structure and other forms of hierarchies present in everyday life. However, following the argument of the first chapter, the festivals through commodity exchange did produce a different space within the shrine grounds. It is clear from firsthand and newspaper accounts that the space of entertainment was distinct and separated from the formal ceremonies of the state. I think this is an important point to make as it shows how capital played a role in producing the space of Yasukuni Shrine. In fact, as this chapter will reveal, the space of the shrine essentially took the form of the dominant logic that structured the everyday in that it reproduced the spaces of Capital-Nation-State. A key concept in this spatial triad that I will employ is the category of exchange, which is a necessary function of the festival since, to quote

Georges Bataille, it is during the festival that “all the possibilities of consumption are brought together.”134 Thus the consumption that took place during the festival through various modes of exchange will be used to think about the spatial organization of Yasukuni Shrine.

Yasukuni offers an ideal space to utilize exchange as a mode of critique since its very existence relies on various types of exchanges: either between people and the gods, the state and its citizens, or, as this chapter will argue, between buyer and seller. Even though the scope of this chapter cannot give a full rendering of the emergence of the nation and the state, it will attempt to unfold how capital comes into the picture through a commodity economy by means of the festival. To accomplish this, first I will outline how a commodity economy historically emerged

133 Ibid., 9. 134 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 54.

77 and its close relation to religious practices in Edo Japan, in particular, the kaichō (a prominent

Edo period festival). By linking the kaichō to Yasukuni Shrine, I want to show how the consumption of entertainment which contributed to the spread and subsequent domination of the commodity mode of exchange is a historical process and one that was inherited by the Meiji state. The festivals at Yasukuni Shrine were well known and attracted large crowds mostly due to the various forms of entertainment that was offered. While much of the entertainment was organized and operated by the state, other forms, such as the peep tents and freak shows

(misemonokoya), were independently run.135 If one was to ask someone about Yasukuni Shrine today, rarely would it spark a conversation about entertainment. And yet if one was to ask this very same question in Tokyo 125 years ago, it would have been rare to hear anything other than comments about the entertainment options on top of Kudan Hill.

The extent to which entertainment shaped and gave meaning to the space of the shrine will be illustrated using a blueprint by the architect Nagano Uheiji in which he demarcated the spaces that I will discuss in relation to modes of exchange: the nation, state and capital. His design called for a large expansion of the shrine grounds and the construction of several new buildings in order to fashion what Nagano imagined as ‘Tokyo’s Acropolis’. Through this unbuilt version of Yasukuni, I hope to tie together how the festival not only facilitated various types of exchanges on the shrine grounds but that it reflected the spatial configuration of Capital-

Nation-State. Thus through a detailed analysis of the festival’s importance to the political economy of the shrine, I strive to demonstrate that Yasukuni had more than just religious and

135 This distinction between the official festival and the unofficial festival is important not only for Bakhtin’s reading of the festival and it’s relation to social norms but it is also significant for understanding how various modes of exchange effect and produce the conditions for other modes—in this instance, how the plundering and redistribution by the state in turn gave rise to the quotidian nature of the commodity form.

78 political implications. It had its own economy, an economy that, while an offshoot of Edo period forms of display culture, was intricately connected to the commodity form at the historical moment when this mode of exchange was becoming dominant in Japan.

The economy of the shrine is one aspect that has been generally neglected in scholarship on Yasukuni but here I will argue that it is an important critique to make in order to understand how state and religion are intricately tied to this space.136 At the center of this history is the relation of both the state and religion to consumption. Whereas the state historically emerged as the adjudicator of surplus (whether it is a surplus in the fields or the collection of taxes), religion also is formed around exchanges that result in the consumption of material goods through ritual.

In his essay “The Economics of Ritual Power,” the historian of Japanese religion, Allan G.

Grapard, laments that, when it comes to the study of ritual practices, its relation to economics is sadly often forgotten. In examining rituals in the Heian period, he observed that rituals in Japan always included material possessions and that these objects were a key component in fusing the

‘visible’ material world and the forces of the ‘invisible’ realm. Helping to bridge this gap was the state since it has always concerned itself with the regulation of exchanges. Grapard states:

No ritualist I can think of among the Baruya of Papua New Guinea, the Brahmins of Kerala, the Taoist masters of Taiwan, the Shinto officiants of Japan, the monks of Bali, or the Catholic priests of France performs for free, or for matters that are not explicitly related to human exchanges or to any exchange tout court… because ritual is fundamentally inseparable from what Georges

136 I think that this is what Tsubouchi’s Yasukuni is missing particularly as he laments the turning of the purification garden (yuniwa) into a parking lot in 1985. Consideration of the shrine’s political economy would give some historical background to Yasukuni’s Chief Priest Matsudaira Nagayoshi’s comment on having to be “self-reliant” (pages 336-337) after being cut off from state funds, as the opening of the parking lot also coincides with the reopening of the Yūshūkan. For reasons unknown (despite the fact that it foregrounds his lamenting of Yasukuni’s declining prominence in Japanese society), Tsubouchi clings to this sacred space as if it was historically unchanged even though this space was originally used for the sumo ring and later the noh theater. During the Meiji period, the purification ceremony was generally held at the Kagura Hall (for the performance of ancient Shinto music and dance), which was to the south side of the Main Hall. Later it was held next to the Worship Hall.

Bataille calls ‘the accursed share’. In all the manifestations of ritual I have briefly examined above, ritual’s relation to the state was connected to consumption…137

The rituals at Yasukuni Shrine also fit into this description by Grapard as it was directly managed and funded by the state. The priests received state salaries and the shrine received an annual stipend for its operations. On top of this, the shrine also received various forms of other donations both votive and monetary that helped facilitate the performance of rituals. Through a broader examination of these donations, I will later show how entertainment factored into the relation between state rituals and consumption.

As was demonstrated in the first chapter, the current discourse of the shrine, as well as the academic literature on Yasukuni, tends to focus either on the nation and the state as their object of study. While this has produced some important critiques of the shrine and Japanese history, it also leaves a large blind spot. I want to supplement these other histories by arguing that the shrine’s religious nature (relation to the nation) and political function (relation to the state) needs to be understood alongside of its political economy (its relation to capital). Thus the underlying argument of this chapter is that we need to rethink our approach to the problem of

Yasukuni so that we can produce a politics that does not simply reproduce the problems of capitalism, the nation and the state. However, in order to break apart this triad in hopes of moving beyond our current socio-political system, this chapter will first attempt to explicate the historical conditions that brought them together in such a supplementary manner.

137 Allan G. Grapard, “The Economics of Ritual Power”, Shinto in History: Ways of the Kami, edited by John Breen and Mark Teeuwen (New York: Routledge, 2000), 89-90.

2.1 From the Kaichō to the Annual Grand Festivals (Reitaisai)138

More often than not, scholarship on Yasukuni quickly jumps through the Meiji period setting up a narrative that is dominated by a history of the Pacific War and the postwar problems surrounding the shrine. These histories generally aim to link the emperor with Shinto and war thus creating the stage for the postwar discussion of war responsibility, the relationship between church and state, as well as the issue of collective memory. Because these narratives drive scholarship on Yasukuni, the Meiji period can seemingly stand out as an anomaly since it does not always neatly fit into the contemporary discourse of the shrine. One example of this is the prominence of entertainment on the shrine grounds during the Meiji period. For those that do address it, entertainment is generally understood as a spectacle or simply as a means to attract crowds to the shrine. The only text that uses entertainment as its focal point in narrating a history of the shrine is Yasukuni by Tsubouchi Yūzō. His work offers a refreshing narrative that discusses entertainment via a spatial history of the shrine grounds, which opens up the space of

Yasukuni beyond the discourse of state and religion. However, even though he includes entertainment alongside the production of state ideology, his anecdotal approach to Yasukuni’s history lacks a clear analysis of why entertainment was a prominent fixture at this state institution. While my own work draws on these earlier investigations on entertainment and the space of Yasukuni, I want to situate my discussion of entertainment within the political economy of the shrine to show that the annual festivals were not just vital for the performance of state and

138 Although religious scholars such as John Breen have translated reitaisai as ‘Great Rites’ I am using the term festival to denote a more popular understanding of the term as it would have been perceived by commoners who attended these events. In Japan, festivals already contain a religious connotation, so it does not ignore the religious nature of the event but at the same time enhances the other activities associated with the Annual Great Festivals.

81 religious rituals but were instrumental in keeping the shrine fiscally viable. Before I give an overview of what it would be like to experience a festival at Yasukuni Shrine during the Meiji period, I want to first give some historical context as to why shrines in Japan became a space for the performance of various types of entertainment. To do this, I will briefly outline characteristics of the kaichō, a prominent Edo period festival, in order to show the overlap in the function and aim of such religious festivals with those that are organized at Yasukuni Shrine.

The kaichō, literally the "lifting of the curtain", was an Edo religious festival that offered the rare opportunity to view religious icons and relics up close. Historically these festivals were meant to attract new patrons to the temple on special days that were generally designed to raise funds for temple maintenance and to supplement operation costs. The occurrence of the kaichō ranged from annual festivities to intervals of thirty years or more and varied from temple to temple. Throughout the Edo period a total of 1,566 kaichō took place and were meticulously recorded by the bakufu since such festivities had to be granted approval.139 Of these kaichō, 824 of them were igaichō, meaning they took place inside the temple sanctuary. These were meant to showcase religious icons such as statues that were not regularly accessible to common worshippers. An example of this is the Ichiino Kannon in Shiga prefecture, which contains a wooden sculpture said to have been carved by Dengyō Daishi in the ninth century and is only put on display once a year in November for the public to view.140 The remaining 741 kaichō were

139 A record of all permits given to temples and shrines from 1733-1868 can be found in the Kyūbaku hikitsugisho under the kaichō sashiyurushichō at the National Diet Library in Tokyo. 140 This particular statue is claimed to have cured a man of diabetes in the Meiji period after praying to it and drinking tea containing oak wood chips. From Ian Reader and George J. Tanabe, Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits and the Common Religion of Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998), 166.

82 degaichō, denoting that they took place outside of the temple grounds.141 The degaichō are unique in that they were much more carnivalesque with various forms of entertainment and shops that supplemented the showing of an icon or relic. Naturally it attracted more crowds and added additional revenues to the temple after collecting land rent from their temporary business associates as well as receiving a share of their profits.

In their book Practically Religious, Reader and Tanabe argue that the emergence of the kaichō was dependent on two external factors. First, the rise of the merchant class meant that there were more people who could afford pilgrimages which were not only expensive but also highly controlled by the bakufu with restrictions on travel throughout the Edo period. Second, is what they refer to as the secularization of Buddhism during this period and the insistence of

"economic returns on any investment of effort and resources."142 Both of their arguments point to the rise of a commodity economy during the Edo period and the effect it had on society including religious practice. The historical emergence of a commodity economy meant that people no longer made things for their own use or consumption but rather for the purpose of selling it in the market place through the medium of money. This shift in the economy was documented by many Edo period writers including the Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666-1728) as he observed how the commodity form had profoundly reconfigured the Tokugawa political

141 Occasionally the degaichō were still local events but were held in an area that could host a larger crowd. Generally they were held in a larger urban area to maximize the number of visitors which is why Asakusa’s Sensoji and Ryogoku’s Honjo Ekōin were popular places to host degaichō. 142 Ian Reader and George J. Tanabe, Jr., 85.

83 structure and everyday life.143 The emergence of a commodity economy also reflected itself onto the organization and operation of temples in Japan.

In the Edo period, large temples generally relied on wealthy benefactors to contribute their material needs while smaller local temples relied on the community to operate. This system of financial support was formalized in 1640 with the “household temple system” (danka seido), which required all households to be registered with and financially support a local temple.144

With more money in circulation due to the increasing trade of commodities, it was possible for temples to collect funds from more than just their usual donors. Both of these factors led to a significant increase in the number of Buddhist temples between the years 1727 to 1852, from

323,462 to 465,049 temples.145 However, this resulted in increased competition, which forced the temples to turn to new methods of raising funds of which the kaichō was one option. In order to receive a permit to hold a kaichō, the temples needed to apply to the Tokugawa bakufu for permission to solicit funds for religious purposes (kange gomen). In some cases, shrines could also request money directly from the bakufu to fund these festivals. In total roughly 28% of temples were successful in being granted a permit or receiving a subsidy from the bakufu.146

143 Katsuya Hirano uses Ogyū Sorai’s observations to point out the irony of Tokugawa economic regulations is that it was the unbridled consumption of the ruling class that transformed the economy into one that was based in the consumption of commodities rather than agricultural production. Katsuya Hirano, The Politics of Dialogic Imagination: Power and Popular Culture in Early Modern Japan (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 52. 144 While originally created to control the spread of Christianity, the danka system also served to place the burden of financially supporting temples on the populace as well as collecting government revenues. In this sense it played a similar role as the “alternate attendance” (sankin kōtai) practice as it forced the powerful and wealthy to divest their resources away from military spending thus helping to limit the possibility of the overthrow of the Tokugawa bakufu. More on the danka system can be found in Neil McMullin’s Buddhism and the State in Sixteenth-Century Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 236-263. 145 While there are debates regarding the exact number of temples during this period, these two figures seem to be the most accurate. Statistics are from McCullin’s notes in Buddhism and the State, 398. 146 Hiruma Hisashi, Edo no Kaichō (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1980), 26.

Since the kaichō was a special event held by a temple maybe only every thirty years, for many it was literally a once in a lifetime event. This in itself was enough to draw large crowds to even remote rural temples. In the more established urban temples like Sensōji in the city of Edo, the kaichō attracted people from neighboring han and generated revenue not only from offerings but also by collecting rent from the many food stalls and carnival shows.147

The kaichō was an important part of Edo period display culture and as the practice entered into the nineteenth century it was increasingly tied to urbanization and the emergence of a commodity economy. 148 Peter Kornicki described the kaichō as one of four forms of public display culture that had emerged throughout the Edo period.149 He links these forms of display with their Meiji counterparts and the expanding influence of world exhibitions in the nineteenth century noting that one main difference is that display culture during the Edo period was generally separated from the state. Here is perhaps the one main difference between the Edo kaichō and the annual festivals at Yasukuni Shrine. Without the presence of the state, these festivals were closer to Rabelais’ carnival as described by Bakhtin since they had the potential to invert social norms. Some examples of this are provided by Scott Schnell who discusses the

147 In 1770, a large kaichō was held at Asakusa’s Sensoji which generated over 500 ryo of donations for the temple. On top of that the temple also received up to 2900 mon of land rent a month from various food stalls and attractions.From Hiruma, Edo no Kaichō, 124-139. 148 Writing a century later, Walter Benjamin would refer to the world exhibitions that began during this same period as “sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish” noting the religious quality of the commodity form which Marx had already described as “abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties”. See Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 151. Also Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 163. 149 Shogakai, literally “calligraphy and painting gatherings” or what Andrew Markus calls ‘celebrity banquets’ in “Shogakai: Celebrity Banquets of the Late Edo Period”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jun., 1993), bussankai, and misemono were the other three forms of display culture that Kornicki discusses. Bussankai and misemono will be discussed later in this paper.

85 rousing drum festival (okoshi daiko) in Furukawa, Gifu-Ken.150 Schnell argues that class antagonisms and injustices occasionally found an outlet in festivals since ritualized practices masked violent aggression against state authority. In this sense, the festival provided an

“institutionalized opportunity for seeking vengeance” for the locals, and since this particular festival took place during the night, those who carried out the violence were unlikely to be caught.151 However, these conditions for fighting against injustices or for inverting social norms were not present at Yasukuni Shrine as the state carefully orchestrated and policed the festivals.

Still, I believe the kaichō can help clarify the economic function of the festivals at Yasukuni

Shrine.

If we take a closer look at the substance and form of the festivals at Yasukuni Shrine during the Meiji period, we can see a close connection to the kaichō as well as observe how the state became increasingly connected to the world of entertainment and commodities. The Annual

Spring Festival of 1872 began on May 15th and lasted for three days.152 The first day was filled with formal events such as the ceremony for the invocation of the dead (shōkonsai) attended by government officials and military leaders. While some of these rituals may have been visible to the general public, it seems unlikely that they would have attracted many spectators in the early years as very few people would have been personally connected to the war dead at this time. The fact that this ceremony was often held the day before the festivities began also points to it being aimed at a different audience than the general population. Even for those who were related to the

150 While this practice developed during the Edo period, Schnell notes that it took on more prominence and became more violent after the sociopolitical and economic reforms of the Meiji government. 151 Scott Schnell, The Rousing Drum: Ritual Practice in a Japanese Community (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), 215. 152 Yasukuni Jinja Hyakunen Shi Vol. 1 (Tokyo: Yasukuni Jinja, 1983), 47.

86 war dead, the earliest instance of bereaved families being invited to the capital to attend the special enshrinement ceremonies was 1877 following the Seinan War. Thus this day was reserved for the pomp and ceremony of the political and military elite, which would have drawn larger crowds on occasions such as when the emperor attended in January of 1874 but otherwise received less attention.

On the second day, however, the festivities featured horse races sponsored and organized by the Army Ministry. The track was first used the previous year and became an annual event until its closure in 1898. Not only did the races prove to be popular, growing in size and frequency, but they also made heroes out of the riders who were keen on winning the prizes. In

1871, the races featured prizes of five watches, five pieces of woolen cloth, and five blankets and each year the prize purse expanded.153 By 1875 the prizes included twenty-five thick blankets

(mōfu) worth 100 yen, however, this was deemed to be too expensive for the Army Ministry and was lowered to 50 yen and later in 1879 to 25 yen per day.154 The horse races attracted many spectators not only for the novelty of horse racing but also for the excitement of the race. The journalist Yamamoto Shōgetsu gave a brief description of the races in the 1890s:

Since horse racing was a rare event, even the trees were overflowing with spectators watching. The horses were generally from the military who hosted the event and the riders were soldiers in their uniforms. It was as if it was a continuation of their military training, recklessly striking the horses with unrivaled malice. Sometimes serious injuries occurred because of the sharp curve which threw riders off of their horses which made it all the more exciting for the spectators.155

153 Teikoku Keiba Kyōkai, Nihon Baseishi: Teikoku Keiba Kyōkaihen Vol. 4 (Tokyo: Hara Shobō, 1982), 602. 154 Ibid., 602. 155 Yamamoto Shōgetsu, Meiji Sesō Hyakuwa (Tokyo: Daiichi Shobō, 1936), 36-37. This occurred after the construction of the Ōmura statue in 1893 so his account was written sometime between 1893 and 1898.

In the first 10 years of operation at least three times the Yomiuri Shinbun reported that riders had fallen off their horses and had been taken to the hospital. On one occasion, a rider was run over by another horse and received what seemed to be fatal injuries. The number of races varied but generally increased throughout the Meiji period as a result of their popularity. In the November festival of 1881, thirty races were held whereas, by December 1895, there were seventy-three races at the special ceremonies marking the end of the Sino-Japanese War. In November of 1891 it was reported that so many people attempted to enter the west gate of the track that it caused a commotion (tsumuji) so big that it was worth mentioning in the newspaper the next day.

The third day of the 1872 festival featured sumo matches followed by fireworks.

Generally the professional wrestlers who competed were associated with the Tokyo Sumo

Association156 with a few exceptions such as the ceremony following the Seinan War in

November of 1877 where 180 wrestlers from the Osaka Sumo Association participated.157 In

July of 1880, amateur wrestlers were also allowed to compete for the first time. Once again, the

Army Ministry supplied the prize money, whose purse in May of 1892 was over 200 yen. The wrestling matches were also a crowd favourite and in 1898 the Tokyo Sumo Association decided that it would hold a 7-day tournament at Yasukuni Shrine the following year in July.158 The sumo matches held during the festivals were often attended by members of the Imperial

Household as well as top Meiji politicians and bureaucrats. Once again the Yomiuri Shinbun gives us an idea of how popular the sumo matches were when they reported that so many

156 The Tokyo Sumo Association and the Osaka Sumo Association merged in 1927 to form what is now today the Japan Sumo Association. 157 Yasukuni Jinja Shi, 115. The total cost of this specific tournament was around 2800 yen. 158 The proceeds from this tournament would be put towards the construction of the new Worship Hall (haiden) that was completed in 1901.

88 spectators (including soldiers in uniform) attended that the stands collapsed in June of 1879. The fireworks that usually concluded the festival were also a major attraction and newspapers often published the time as well as the number of fireworks to be set off hoping to attract a larger audience.

The large number of people who attended the festivals made Yasukuni Shrine an ideal place for the operation of peep tents and freak shows (misemonokoya) and other types of vendors.

As part of the expanded policing of entertainment, on June 15, 1876, it was announced in the

Yokohama Mainichi that all misemono from Ginza, Asakusa’s Okuyama and Kuramae were no longer allowed to operate there (except for special events such as festivals) and had to move immediately to either Kanda’s Hanaokamachi or to the Shōkonsha in Fujimicho (Yasukuni

Shrine).159 It is impossible to know to what extent this was enforced but it certainly contributed to the increase of misemono operating on the shrine grounds. For example, the Yomiuri Shinbun listed a number of misemono that operated during the July 1877 festival and in 1892, there were so many stalls set up that they covered the road from the shrine grounds all the way to the bottom of Kudan Hill.160 During the Annual Grand Fall Festival in 1900, the paper counted at least 36 misemono operating on the shrine grounds.

The author Tayama Katai (1872-1930) wrote a brief section on his own experience at

Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo no Sanjyū Nen. He begins by stating that, even though Ueno Park made an impression on him, it still did not compare to Yasukuni and the memories he had of that

159 Meiji no Engei Vol. 1, edited by Kurata Yoshihiro (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Gekijyō Chōsa Yōseibu Geinō Chōsashitsu, 1980), 156. 160 At the 1877 festival there were stalls selling paper cranes, there were dancing “ascending dragons” (nobori ryū), carts filled with flowers (hanamiguruma), standing dolls, and a handmade noodles stand (sangokuichi). The festival in November of the same year also featured many stalls that were selling famous local foods.

89 place. His first visit at the age of six was visiting the shrine with his mother to see the fountain and golden carp. As he got older, his visits became more frequent partly because his father was killed in the Seinan War (1877) and was enshrined there. Other memories from his childhood include asking his mother for money in order to see the various misemono and vendors during the annual festivals. He writes:

After I got a little older I used to like going out by myself at night to walk around the various illuminated stalls set up on the roadside, though these were not proper shows as such. There were fortune- tellers, and people with acetylene lamps, and people who mended broken china by fusing the pieces under heat. They always had people gathered around their stalls, and I used to think that the very way in which they spoke was a type of art in itself. There’d also be someone singing sentimental love songs, and someone--a student, perhaps--performing sword dances.161

Even though Tayama would have been part of a very small demographic of citizens who had relatives enshrined at Yasukuni in its first two decades, it is interesting how he speaks very little of his father’s own enshrinement and instead focusses on the allure of the misemono. Of course,

Tayama was not the only one who was captivated by the various types of entertainment offered at the shrine. Meiji bureaucrats like Kido Takayoshi, scholars such as Hattori Seiichi (pen-name

Hattori Bushō), as well as other personal accounts of the shrine grounds all gave detailed descriptions of the excitement and carnivalesque atmosphere that the festivals provided. The attraction of the Annual Grand Festivals quickly turned Yasukuni Shrine into a tourist destination illustrated by its presence in guidebooks during the 1870s and 1880s. With such fanfare and reputation, it is easy to see how the architect Nagano Uheiji could envision Yasukuni as ‘Tokyo’s Acropolis’ in 1907.

161 Tayama Katai, Literary Life in Tokyo, 1885-1915: Tayama Katai’s memoirs ‘Thirty years in Tokyo’ (New York: Brill, 1987), 91.

2.2 Tokyo’s Acropolis

In the October 1907 issue of Architectural Journal (Kenchiku Zasshi), Nagano Uheiji162

(1867-1937) presented a blueprint for remaking the Yasukuni Shrine complex.163 Although at this time Nagano was already a prolific architect having designed the Bank of Japan branches in

Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto and Hiroshima, his designs for Yasukuni were apparently neither requested, promoted nor, in the end, approved by the state. Nonetheless, his vision of the shrine grounds conveyed an image of a victorious postwar Japan in a moment of ecstasy that is visible in his sketches. With a towering triumphal gate, three neo-classical buildings, and a European style formal garden, his plans sought to transform Yasukuni into a monument of global scale. In fact, in his own words, Nagano decided that it was time to make Yasukuni Shrine and Kudan

Hill ‘Tokyo’s Acropolis’.164 Envisioning a full remodeling of the shrine grounds that would have had implications for the configuration of Tokyo’s downtown area, Nagano went as far as to include his own take on the Agora. He fashioned this open courtyard that would be used as a marketplace and public square after the Roman forum and placed it at the foot of Kudan Hill just as the Agora was situated in relation to the Acropolis (I will come back to this tension between

162 Nagano Uheiji was a Meiji period architect who designed over thirty national banks for Japan. He was born in what is now Niigata prefecture in the city of Jōetsu. In 1893, he graduated from the Engineering Department at the Imperial University (currently the University of Tokyo). He is also well-known for his design of the Presidential Office Building in Taipei which was completed in 1919. 163 Nagano Uheiji, “Meiji Sanjyūnanahachinen Sengo Kinen Kenchikubutsu Setsumei,” Kenchiku Zasshi No. 250, October 1907: 560. 164 In 1933, the German architect, Bruno Taut (1880-1938), would later claim Ise Jingu to be Japan’s ‘Acropolis’ saying that “(the Parthenon) is the greatest and most aesthetically sublime building in stone as the Ise shrine is in wood.” Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan (Tokyo: Sanseidō, 1937), 139. While Nagano is thinking more about space and the meaning of the Acropolis, Taut’s comparison is based on structure and, more specifically, the material elements that were used.

91 the agora and forum below). However, as I will argue, this visual reproduction of the Acropolis was more than just an architectural homage to the ancient empires of the past. Nagano’s design incorporated elements that spoke to how the people of Tokyo both experienced and perceived

Yasukuni Shrine during the Meiji period. In particular, the inclusion of the forum and its relation to entertainment on the shrine grounds opens up a part of Yasukuni’s history that has thus far received little attention: its political economy.

Although Nagano’s blueprint for Yasukuni Shrine was never realized—perhaps even more so because it was not—it opens up a space in which we can think about the shrine historically without the limitations of the contemporary discourse that have produced the so- called ‘Yasukuni Issue’. In other words, it offers an image of how people might have perceived

Yasukuni Shrine during the Meiji period. At this time, Yasukuni Shrine was locally known as a place for amusement rather than having a strict association with Japan’s military endeavors and the commemoration of the war dead. It hosted foreign circuses from Europe (from France in

1871 and Italy in 1887), operated the first horse racing track in Tokyo, and was a popular place for Edo forms of entertainment like peep and freak shows (misemonokoya). As I mentioned earlier, although some scholars have written about this aspect of the shrine’s history, entertainment is generally considered a spectacle or sometimes is used in contrast to the contemporary moment in order to capture a temporal image of the shrine when things were not so complicated.165 However, this begs the question of why entertainment was such a prominent feature at the shrine when the state obviously envisioned it as a tool for nation building? Or, in other words, how are we to conceptualize the presence of entertainment alongside the

165 For example, John Nelson argues that this was a stage of Yasukuni’s development before the state had fully implemented its ideological function. “Social Memory as Ritual Practice: Commemorating Spirits of the Military Dead at Yasukuni Shinto Shrine,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 62, no. 2 (May, 2003), 449.

92 performance of rituals coordinated by the state? I argue that the key to answering these questions is to examine the phenomenon of entertainment at Yasukuni Shrine through a study of its political economy. By focussing on the economic aspect, I hope to show that Nagano Uheiji’s

1907 plans to turn Kudan Hill into Tokyo’s Acropolis demonstrates not only the degree to which entertainment was associated with the space of the shrine but also how integral it was to its economic survival.

Another aspect of envisioning Yasukuni Shrine as Tokyo’s Acropolis is the type of social space that it produces. The open spaces in Nagano’s plan, which will be discussed in more detail below, allowed for the congregation of large crowds and the neo-classical architecture were elements of his hope to realize Tokyo’s own acropolis in the heart of the city. Coupled with his version of the Roman Forum, this newly fashioned space echoed elements of the ancient Greek agora as well. This tension between the Greek and Roman nature of public space is an important aspect of Nagano’s design because I believe it captures the image of Yasukuni Shrine as a contested battleground as was discussed in the previous chapter. The agora was a space designed to facilitate communal solidarity by allowing citizens of the city to participate in political life. In postwar Japan, the historian Hani Gorō observed such open spaces as having the potential to produce the city’s autonomy from the state.166 Although Hani did not want to call these spaces utopian or revolutionary, he noted that these open public spaces gave way to self-government like in ancient Athens.167 In Nagano’s historical moment of 1907, Hibiya Park was really the only open public space that was associated with collective assembly for the purpose of voicing

166 Hani Gorō, Toshi no Ronri (Tokyo: Keiso Shobō, 1968), 52. 167 For more on public spaces or hiroba in postwar Japan, see Jordan Sands, Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

93 discontent with the government and thus functioned as a type of agora in Tokyo. Nagano certainly would have been aware of the protests in 1905 and 1906 at Hibiya Park and one could imagine how the open public spaces in his design would have been used similarly by protesters given its proximity to government buildings and the invested meaning that Yasukuni Shrine held for the state. In fact, Yasukuni Shrine already had a history of providing a space for political dissent since the summer of 1870 when several hundred people protested against the rebuilding of geisha houses which were destroyed by a fire.168

On the other hand, the forum was designed to house various types of entertainment with the purpose of making them a permanent feature of the shrine. To recall the words of Juan Carlos

Pérgolis in the epigraph, the real difference between the agora and the forum was that “the

Roman Forum made [the citizen] aware of the state.” This point will be examined later on in this chapter when I discuss the various types of exchanges that occur on the shrine grounds. But for now, it will suffice to say that the ideological aims of the state were not limited to the rituals and their nationalistic purpose but that the exchange of commodities was also central to the disciplining effect of Yasukuni Shrine as a state apparatus. Thus the tension between the agora and the forum as one between self-autonomy and the authority of the state is important to recognize during this period as the space of Yasukuni was contested by discourses that could not be fully captured by the state. However, before discussing how modes of exchange can help illuminate the role of the state in the production of Yasukuni as a space, I want to present

Nagano’s 1907 blueprint for Yasukuni Shrine in detail.

168 The geisha houses were probably located near the Fukagawa district, which was close to two major fires (Kanda and Kyobashi) that broke out in 1870. The account of the procession at Yasukuni comes from the diaries of Kido Takayoshi who comments that their actions are absurd. “2 August 1870,” The Diary of Kido Takayoshi, Vol. 1, trans. by Sidney Devere Brown and Akiko Hirota (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1983), 386.

2.3 Nagano Uheiji’s Yasukuni

Victory over the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War was a pinnacle moment for the

Meiji government and its modern army. The victory celebrations at home were marked with grand parades and the construction of triumphal arches across Japan. It was in this celebratory atmosphere that Nagano Uheiji made plans to redesign the Yasukuni Shrine complex. His blueprint for Kudan Hill was meant to be a national memorial for those who died in the Russo-

Japanese War, which is easily recognizable with his incorporation of a towering triumphal gate and large neo-classical buildings that would have been visible from all around the city. If the victory was Japan’s crowning achievement then Yasukuni was to be the jewel of that crown by being transformed from a simple shrine into a monumental hill-top complex. First I will briefly give an overview of his blueprint for the shrine before focussing on his inclusion of a permanent entertainment space at the foot of Kudan Hill.

Nagano suggested a full remaking of the shrine grounds that would have more than doubled the existing allotment of land by adding another 27,000 tsubo (22 acres).169 Expanding to the north as far as Chūzaka street to align with the road behind the war museum (Yūshūkan) as well as to the east as far as the Nihonbashi River, the resulting space would have been a rectangular shape that began at the foot of Kudan Hill and made its way west up to the main hall of the shrine. The main shrine as well as the area around the war museum would have been left as they were while the rest of the grounds would be completely transformed.

169 1 tsubo=3.3 square meters

Figure 1: The Yasukuni Shrine grounds, from Kenchiku Zasshi, October, 1907.

The walkway leading to the inner sanctuary and the newly constructed hall of worship began from the bronze torii that Emperor Meiji donated to the shrine in 1887. From the bronze torii the walkway opened up into a giant promenade that Nagano referred to as the middle garden

(see Figure 2). With three avenues allowing for horse carriages as well as pedestrian traffic the middle garden was meant to facilitate the arrival of large crowds. To the north of the middle garden was access to the Naval and Military Museum, which was connected to the Naval and

Military Library on the west side and a Military Club on the east side by covered walkways. In

96 contrast to the shrine’s shinmei-zukuri (style of shrine architecture based on Ise Jingu), the buildings would be constructed with stone and red bricks in a blend of European elements

(Renaissance, Baroque and neo-classical) and, from what can be gathered from the rough sketches that Nagano made, the Naval and Military Museum was the basis for his 1910 winning design of the Presidential Office Building in Taipei. The Museum was four stories at its tallest point and was roughly 165 meters (91 ken) by 67m (37 ken) in size. The Library and Military

Club were both three stories tall and had dimensions of roughly 62m (34 ken) by 49m (27 ken).

At the eastern side of the middle garden stood a large memorial gate that towered over the grounds at 75.75m (250 shaku) in height with an archway of almost 11 meters (6 ken). In typical

Nagano style, the gate would be composed of both western and eastern influences that contained the “sacredness of the pyramids mixed with classical architecture.”170 Following the Russo-

Japanese War, triumphal arches began appearing all across the country imitating the war celebrations of Europe. At almost 76 meters, the memorial gate would have been the tallest structure in Japan eclipsing the famous Ryōunkaku in Asakusa by 7 meters and denotes an intentional departure from the use of a torii to mark the entrance to a sacred space. The memorial gate opened to a large intersection that would join Kudanzaka Street with Chūzaka Street and would allow for access to the hill from Iidamachi. On the other side of the gate were the formal gardens that would be layered, stepping down the decline of the hill towards the lower city

(shitamachi). At the base of the formal gardens would be the last section of Nagano's refashioned

Yasukuni complex: the entertainment grounds (kōgyōba).

170 Nagano, Kenchiku Zasshi, 561.

Figure 2: Nagano’s blueprint for Yasukuni Shrine, from Kenchiku Zasshi, October 1907.

While Nagano’s arch and neo-classical structures on top of Kudan Hill deserve analysis simply due to their grandeur at this historical moment, I want instead to focus on what may at first appear as an oddity in his plans. The entertainment space was designed to resemble the

Roman Forum in its function as both a market and public square for performances. A two-story stone and red brick row house would be built around the square with a courtyard in the middle.

This structure would serve to permanently house various shops and food stalls and was designed with the intent of recreating Asakusa's shopping street (nakamise).171 The interior space would

171 Ibid., 561.

98 be large enough to allow for various misemono shows to set up during the annual festivals and perhaps even be permanently housed. Finally, in the center of the courtyard, a 67 meter tall stone pillar dedicated to the war dead would be erected.

The inclusion of this space shows the extent to which entertainment was associated with the space of Yasukuni and was obviously something that Nagano envisioned as being a part of the shrine’s future as well. It’s even more significant that he included this space given the recent redevelopment of the shrine grounds. At the turn of the century, the space of Yasukuni was considerably transformed by the addition of a Hall of Worship (haiden) in front of the inner sanctuary as well as the removal of the horseracing track in 1901. Although there was no official reason given for the removal of the track, it is possible that the increase of crowds following the victory over China in 1895 or the cost of operating the races had made the event financially prohibitive for the Army Ministry. With the removal of the racetrack, this large open space was now labelled as the Outer Garden (gaien). Perhaps it was this open free space that inspired part of Nagano’s design or maybe he was even more closely informed and connected to the shrine than historical documents suggest. In June of 1906, the Yasukuni Shrine Office prohibited the operation of stalls that had set up shop where the race track used to be since the crowds that gathered there were obstructing the path for those who wanted to pay their respects at the shrine.172 We do not know whether Nagano was aware of this issue regarding the Outer Garden, but his plans certainly resolved the problems of overcrowding and the proliferation of shops on the shrine grounds.

172 Yasukuni Jinja Hyakunen Shi, Jireki Nenpyō (Tokyo: Yasukuni Jinja, 1987), 169.

The grandiose nature of Nagano's plans would have further entrenched Yasukuni’s position as one of Tokyo's most popular locations to visit during the Meiji period. With an estimated cost of 17.6 million yen, it would have amounted to roughly 9% of the 1908 Army and

Navy Ministry’s budget173 and would have been eight times the cost of Nagano's Presidential

Office Building in Taipei that was built in 1910. Perhaps more importantly, it also offers an intriguing organization of space that seems to reflect the emerging dominant social form of

Capital-Nation-State. For example, the Inner Sanctuary (honden) and the Hall of Worship

(haiden) on the west end of the shrine grounds is easily associated with the space of the nation where the living commune with the dead. This space in itself is not necessarily tied to the state as it simply functions to establish a community within Shinto traditions. However, due to the shrine’s relation to the state through the sacrifice of the lives of Japanese citizens, the nation and the state are conceptually brought together. As we move east through the library, museum, and the triumphal gate we enter into the space of the state. As Benedict Anderson noted, the process of nation-building depended on three institutions of power: the census, the museum, and the map.174 In this case, we can see how the library is the census through the collecting of information and statistics, the museum stands for itself as the marker of an imagined historical past, and the triumphal gate as a landmark that makes Yasukuni, and Japan through its victory over Russia in 1905, literally visible on the map.175 Finally, the Roman-style forum is the space of entertainment which signifies the exchange of commodities that connect the space of

Yasukuni far beyond the limits of the shrine grounds. Thus the space of Yasukuni Shrine can be

173 Data taken from Shiryō Meiji Hyakunen (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Kaisha, 1966), 651. 174 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006), 163-185. 175 In 1909, the shrine built its own library but it was destroyed along with its collections in the 1923 Kantō Earthquake. Today a library once again sits in the northwest corner of the shrine grounds.

100 thought of as a nexus in which the historical coming together of nation-state-capital can be observed.

2.4 Fusing Capital-Nation-State

In the first chapter, I discussed three aspects of the production of space at the shrine in order to argue that the everyday experience of those who entered that space had the potential to disrupt the state narrative of Yasukuni. Of course, a significant factor in how everyday life is experienced depends on the economic system and I used the ideals of a liberal modern state to contrast it with the material conditions of the early Meiji period to argue that everyday experience violently contradicted the discourse of the state. This next section will continue that argument by further examining how the space of the shrine can also be divided into spheres that reflect three particular modes of exchange: reciprocity, plunder and redistribution, and commodity exchange. As Lefebvre stated “the passage from one mode of production to another… results from contradictions in the social relations of production which cannot fail to leave their mark on space and indeed revolutionize it. Since, ex hypothesi, each mode of production has its own particular space, the shift from one mode to another must entail the production of a new space.”176 The dominant mode of exchange also changes with the mode of production since both are based in social relations meaning we can assume that each mode of exchange also has a particular space. However, even though during the Meiji period commodity exchange became the dominant mode the other modes of exchange continue to persist. Just like walking through any historical city and observing older buildings that might have been built at a

176 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, Mass: Basil Blackwell, Inc., 1991), 46.

101 time when a different mode of exchange might have been dominant, each mode of exchange continues to exist even when new modes emerge and become dominant. Thus we can still see examples of reciprocity (Nation) as well as plunder and redistribution (State) today even though we live in a world that is dominated by commodity exchange (Capital).

2.4.1 Mode of Exchange A: The Nation

The nation seems to be at the core of the shrine both materially and ideologically.

Yasukuni is, after all, where those who sacrificed their lives for the nation are enshrined and remembered. The Yasukuni Doctrine that was mentioned in the first chapter derives from this logic of needing to offer something back to those who had given their life. Thus the concept of reciprocity through the gift is built into the logic of the shrine through the giving of life itself and the counter-gift of reverence and rituals that are performed in exchange. This aspect is infused with what Georges Bataille refers to as an economy principled on loss which is built into the ritual of gifting.177 For Bataille the general economy is not derived from a lack but rather from surplus, however, this excess haunts the economy to the extent that it often erupts in a violent fashion (such as war).178 Thus the excess needs to be dealt with by giving it away, losing it or simply destroying it. In this sense rituals and community are tied to the concept of sacrifice out of a material necessity. In his text Theory of Religion, Bataille discusses sacrifice as a transition, one that releases the victim from the world of the profane (of utility and things) to return to the

177 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share Vol. 1, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 69. 178 I will return to this notion of surplus and soldiers in the final chapter when looking at relative surplus populations as a literal reserve army.

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“intimacy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is.”179 This transition is not so much a return to a natural state but rather one that is based on the problem of excess.

Important here is how he classifies this movement as one similar to the movement from use value to an exchange value. The sacrificial object no longer has any utility but can only be given value through a transition into something that holds value in a system of relations. Ritual is then the carnivalesque moment that allows for its consumption and thus the realization of its value.

Or, in other words, the dead at Yasukuni are the sacrifices which lose their utility (as labourers) but are then given an exchange value within the system of relations that constitutes the nation.

We can see a form of this exchange in the ‘invocation of the dead’ rituals performed at the shrine. In Shinto rituals the gods (kami) are not present within religious structures so need to be invited into that space. This is usually done by constructing an altar (himorogi) and invoking the spirits (hi) to enter into the sacred sakaki tree branches. An offering is then made in order to placate the gods before they are sent off once again. The act of invoking the gods to this space can also be framed as invoking them to once again participate in the process of exchange. Below is the order of ceremony for the shōkonsai on May 6, 1872:

•ceremony for the offerings of sake and food at the main hall begins •officials and Shinto priests are seated •the welcoming of the gods (geishin) •making of the offering (kenkyō) •offering of a sakaki (tree branch) with strips of paper tied to it representing the gods (tamagushi) •intoning of the ritual prayers (norito) •the officials worship followed by the Shinto priests •the end of the offerings •sending off of the gods •departure from the main hall180

179 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, 44. 180 Kindaishi Shiryō Rikugunshō Nisshi Vol. 1, ed. by Asakura Haruhito (Tokyo: Tokyo Dōshuppan, 1988), 63-65.

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This short ceremony gives us a glimpse of the various exchanges that occur between the living and the dead through Shinto rituals. After offerings are made to the gods the exchange is then reciprocated as they offer their own gift of acting as ‘guardians’ of the living which in turns realizes the value of their initial sacrifice. However, these are not the only material gifts that are offered at the shrine.

Simultaneously, as these very rituals are being performed by the Shinto priests, another form of gifting occurs at Yasukuni through the offerings (saisen) made by those who came to pray to the war dead. The amount of money that was collected through offerings far outweighed any other form of revenue obtained by the shrine during the Meiji period. In fact, the amount of monetary offerings received from 1891-1910 alone amounted to ¥18,133,665 (Table 1), which accounted for over 95% of all revenues. This money would have contributed not only to covering its operating expenses but also for investing in capital projects such as expanding the shrine’s landholdings and building new structures. If we look at the breakdown of the offerings by month, it is clear that there is an increase of offerings both immediately prior to and during the annual festivals in May and November.181 In fact, the months where there were no festivals generally saw around one-tenth of the offerings and in 1906, the difference between the lowest and highest month was one-sixtieth. By looking at the monetary offerings, we can see how important the annual festivals were for raising funds that kept the shrine fiscally healthy. Since most forms of entertainment only operated during the festivals (although there are some records of misemonokoya operating throughout the year), it points to the structural role that entertainment held in relation to the political economy of the shrine. Thus entertainment did more than simply

181 The only time where the numbers vary is for December 1895 since a special ceremony was held to commemorate the victory in the Sino-Japanese War. Records for monetary offerings were not kept prior to 1890 as this was when the Yasukuni Shrine Office was constructed.

104 introduce people to Yasukuni Shrine as other scholars have concluded. Of course, due to

Yasukuni’s relation to the state, even these offerings made in the name of the nation made their way to state coffers as if they were a voluntary tax.

Table 1: Monetary Offerings at Yasukuni Shrine from 1891-1910 (yen)

April May June July Aug. Sept. Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. Feb. March

1891 18,643 32,844 7,109 7,493 7,176 7,429 13,832 14,840 3,804 6,428 6,404 7,934

1892 26,934 28,375 4,392 4,805 7,757 5,168 7,205 21,122 4,928 8,642 8,079 15,370

1893 35,481 87,717 7,461 6,321 6,003 9,497 8,521 26,345 5,588 8,515 7,215 23,298

1894 28,360 35,221 7,300 5,770 6,029 57,773 30,786 46,994 16,856 20,688 33,948 42,360

1895 78,359 70,010 23,972 16,281 18,623 16,185 24,669 26,328 153,465 32,554 23,134 43,063

1896 89,101 100,320 25,460 19,854 21,424 23,744 25,346 76,981 15,444 20,372 20,685 35,681

1897 84,630 71,900 19,025 18,392 18,369 19,146 25,165 26,246 15,798 19,484 26,434 23,728

1898 91,162 73,582 14,181 11,973 12,078 14,852 24,340 84,728 15,826 22,031 22,371 35,273

1899 76,433 65,161 12,000 13,008 10,334 7,353 7,880 35,403 5,375 12,786 11,919 18,132

1900 42,298 60,405 8,647 8,225 6,576 9,559 13,494 55,036 8,161 14,927 9,769 20,867

1901 40,001 56,689 8,568 9,749 7,813 10,823 31,729 316,767 23,033 41,353 31,276 64,631

1902 136,566 146,622 28,311 27,006 28,827 31,305 96,055 137,725 17,361 34,471 27,992 42,577

1903 110,762 159,792 24,751 25,608 20,879 22,338 29,941 120,860 25,516 29,372 48,650 59,410

1904 99,210 316,866 51,744 52,257 41,705 65,872 75,985 222,146 43,821 94,257 70,771 96,738

1905 213,688 916,493 59,074 83,978 75,579 74,638 126,431 228,686 50,940 82,492 50,881 106,246

1906 432,397 1,483,787 65,117 58,625 61,220 66,030 79,645 236,690 39,130 66,075 25,225 92,602

1907 337,352 930,674 88,343 102,053 38,152 52,275 52,777 184,192 32,554 61,440 50,199 84,490

1908 177,352 608,108 46,675 53,820 45,008 72,307 75,620 266,582 24,400 49,424 50,543 109,391

1909 204,810 414,400 50,455 42,803 49,626 72,030 66,491 301,083 31,510 52,732 39,370 93,654

1910 286,270 482,050 30,650 44,370 39,040 47,830 51,310 418,640 31,880 50,870 57,930 14,887

Compiled from Yasukuni Jinja Shi, 114.

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2.4.2 Mode of Exchange B: The State

Locating the physical presence of the state on the shrine grounds is an easy task. From the imperial symbols to the military or police personnel that guarded the shrine, the space of

Yasukuni was blanketed with images of state power and authority. From the very beginning, the shrine was designed to be a state institution and was managed by state bureaucrats. Besides the state’s involvement in the production and performance of rituals, it also played a fundamental role in ensuring the fiscal viability of Yasukuni Shrine through annual stipends and the payment of salaries. However, observing the relation between Yasukuni Shrine and the state’s mode of exchange is obstructed since only half of the process takes place on the shrine grounds. The emergence of the mode of exchange B historically appears through the act of plundering which, as Karatani notes, is “in itself not a kind of exchange” but rather it is a condition for the

“prototype of the state.”182 That is because, if one community seeks to continuously plunder from another group, it must offer something in return in order to placate the other from participating in a reciprocal form of violence. This sets up the contractual theory of the state in that it can plunder as long as it can guarantee peace and order within that community. Thus the power of the state to plunder is constituted in its responsibility to then redistribute that wealth in a manner that is satisfactory to its citizens. In the case of Yasukuni, this relation with the state appears as one-sided since the shrine was exempt from paying taxes due to it being state property. So if we are to determine the relation of Yasukuni to the state via its mode of exchange it must be captured within the framework that the shrine is a product of the redistribution of wealth for which its initial act of plundering is generally erased and forgotten.

182 Karatani, The Structure of World History, 5-6.

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It is well known that Yasukuni was a benefactor of state funds until the end of the war when the 1947 Constitution separated church and state in Japan. However, as the head archivist at the shrine, Noda Anpei, quickly pointed out, this annual government stipend was not only significantly less than what Ise Jingu received at the time but it also was not enough to cover all the shrine’s expenses. Thus, from the outset, Yasukuni Shrine was dependent on generating revenues either through soliciting donations, collecting land rent or by the operation of profit- producing ventures. In August 1869, it was announced that the shrine would receive 10,000 koku of rice, however, just four months later, this amount was cut by half due to financial pressures on the Finance Ministry.183 Therefore, from December 1869, the shrine received 5000 koku of rice as an annual stipend and this continued for seven years. From 1876 the stipend was monetized and the amount was set at 7,550 yen, which remained unchanged for the rest of the Meiji period.

However, this official support from the government was also supplemented by donations made directly from the imperial house. The chart below outlines the frequency and type of offerings that were made by the extended imperial family during the Meiji period.

183 The measurement koku is roughly 150 kilograms of rice which was considered enough rice to feed one adult for a year. As the Tokugawa economy was structured around the production of rice, koku was used to determine and measure one’s wealth. This system was replaced after the 1873 Land Tax Reform, which monetized taxation which resulted in the dominance of a commodity exchange economy mediated by money.

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Table 2: Special Votive Offerings from the Imperial Family in the Meiji Period

Benefactor Frequency Offerings Monetary Value (¥)

Emperor 13 times Cloth (heihaku) and money 24,300 between 1874- 1910

Crown Prince 29 times Sticky rice cakes (kagamimochi), refined 390 between 1899- sake (seishu) and money (Taisho Emperor) 1910

Imperial Families 94 times Sticky rice cakes (kashiwamochi and 155,400 between 1869- kagamimochi) sacred sake (shinshu), 1907 fish, Japanese dough buns (manjū), and money

Collected from Yasukuni Jinja Shi, 131-143.

The total monetary value of the gifts was over ¥180,000 which amounted to 66% of what the shrine received from the government through annual stipends. On top of these gifts the emperor also donated ¥15,000 for the construction of a torii in 1887. The government further extended financial support for the shrine by sponsoring the Special Grand Festivals (rinji taisai) between 1895 and 1910. On nine different occasions, ¥326,500 was donated to the shrine to cover expenses ranging from preparing the grounds or paying wages for those who directed the activities. Sometimes even foreign branches of the Japanese government contributed to the shrine such as the Taiwanese Government-General’s (sōtokufu) donation of ¥10,000 to the shrine during the Annual Grand Spring Festival in 1911. Through imperial and government benefactors alone, Yasukuni Shrine received over ¥531,000 between 1869 and 1911. In relation to the annual stipends this was more than two times what the shrine officially received from the government.

Although these special donations made to the shrine amount to a significant sum at the time

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(especially considering that the Yasukuni priests on a state salary would have collectively received a maximum of ¥2,340 per year),184 it did not compare to the amount of money collected through monetary offerings from the general public.

Another revenue generator for the shrine that was also a product of the popularity of the grand festivals was the money collected from the entry fees to the war museum (Yūshūkan).

Although the historical records only give annual statistics thus making it impossible to break down exactly when people visited the Yūshūkan, we can assume that it also reflects a similar breakdown as the monetary offerings since the festivals attracted the largest crowds. At a cost of

3 sen per adult and 1 sen for children aged 6-10, the Yūshūkan would have been another form of entertainment for the masses albeit one that was directly managed by the state.185 From 1882 to

1910, the shrine collected ¥119,113 from over 4.21 million visitors to the Yūshūkan, which from

1890 was directed into the shrine’s coffers after it came under the supervision of the Yasukuni

Shrine Office.186 When this total is added to the amount collected through all donations and the stipend, we can see that, by the end of the Meiji period, the official state support of the shrine only amounted to 1.5% of total revenues. Thus, the relation of the state to ritual in terms of the political economy of Yasukuni Shrine is reliant on the consumption of not only votive offerings but also on the consumption of entertainment by the masses.

184 Yasukuni Jinja Shi, 176. 185 According to Tsurumi’s study of workers at the Osaka Cotton-Spinning Mill, this would have been an expensive exhibit equalling a day’s wages for a couple with two children over the age of 10 in 1883. E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 43. 186 The number of visitors is significantly higher than what the revenues would suggest because military veterans and soldiers were allowed to enter free of charge and occasionally on special days admission was free.

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Although the almost ¥280,000 received in annual stipends as well as the ¥531,000 of donations from the imperial house and government during the entire Meiji period seems small compared to the amount of offerings that the shrine received, this guaranteed financial backing from the state secured the fiscal viability of the shrine particularly during the early years when the offerings would have been substantially less. Perhaps more importantly it also allowed the shrine to undertake larger capital projects as it had easier access to capital through the state treasury which will be discussed further in the next chapter. However, with any discussion of state funding it is important to remember that these funds are raised by the plundering of wealth through taxation, which was largely shouldered by the rural peasantry during the Meiji period.

Thus the materialization of buildings and festivals at Yasukuni can be directly linked to the hardships and financial precariousness of the peasants. Of course, the land tax was only one way in which the state plundered the peasantry but it is not the method that is most often associated with Yasukuni Shrine; that would be universal conscription. This “blood tax” (ketsuzei), as it was infamously announced in the Conscription Edict, meant that the peasantry not only produced the financial means for the creation of Yasukuni but they also overwhelmingly provided the bodies that gave meaning to the state’s ideological objectives for the shrine.

2.4.3 Mode of Exchange C: Capital

In order to discuss commodity exchange in relation to Yasukuni Shrine I want to examine one last form of Edo display culture: the peep tents and freak shows (misemonokoya). Through the misemono I want to examine the type of commodity exchanges that took place on the shrine grounds to understand how the commodity form relates to the mode of exchange of the nation and the state. As was established above, the financial security of Yasukuni Shrine was largely

110 dependent on offerings made by those who visited the shrine grounds and these offerings were for the most part collected during festivals. Although the festivals offered many types of entertainment including horse races, sumo, noh performances, and fireworks, it was the misemono that were not directly funded or organized by the state. Thus the position of the misemono at Yasukuni Shrine was, at times, precarious as it did not always fit into the state’s political project even though they were a popular part of the festivals. In this section, I want to make evident the uneasy relation between the state and misemono and then how this relation was transformed into one that produced a new type of commodity exchange: labour power.

In February 1868, an ordinance from the new government regarding Tokyo referred to misemono as being “unsightly for Japan’s capital city” (kōkoku no shufu ni migurushii).187 There was already lots of opposition to the idea of moving the capital city to Tokyo from the historic and sacred city of Kyoto and this ordinance points to some of the doubts about whether or not

Tokyo was the right choice. Attempting to assert the position and the office of the emperor in the new capital the government leaders strived to create a new political culture that would uphold the authority of the imperial throne. The Japanese historian, Obinata Sumio, argues that Meiji policy towards entertainment reveals how “culture does not belong to the people themselves but rather is something that is the tool for political power to integrate the people.”188 Of course, for the

Meiji state this integration of the people took place in the name and image of the emperor. In

August of 1872, the Grand Council of State (Daijyōkan) presented three regulations aimed at

187 Furukawa Miki, Misemono no Rekishi (Tokyo: Yuzan Shuppan, 1970), 292. 188 Sumio Obinata, “Sangeinō to kenryoku” in Bakumatsu Ishin no Bunka (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2001), 277.

111 policing performances.189 The first regulation was that any defamation or damage to the character or position of the emperor was strictly prohibited. Second, was that the state always had the power to meddle (kanshō) with the content in order to make sure that it contained some moral instruction (kanzen chōaku). Finally, all performers had to act within the law meaning that even if they did not violate the first two regulations any number of other laws could be used to silence or remove unsightly performances from the capital. With such a broad definition, infractions of these regulations were easy to find among those who made a living working in the misemono tents.

As Gerald Figal has noted, removing the fantastic and supernatural was not an easy task since it already was a condition of modernity itself.190 Nonetheless, throughout the 1870s, the state began to filter out practices that no longer met the conditions of their vision for a modern nation state. Many of the first laws regarding entertainment practices dealt directly with the body as the state became interested in proper representations of a healthy body as an analogy for the national body ethic.191 In 1873, the Central Sanitary Bureau (Eiseikyoku)192 was established and first directed by Nagayo Sensai (1838-1902). As part of the Iwakura mission he learned about public health in both the United States and Germany. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the discovery of the germ theory of disease had already begun to transform how

189 Daijyō Ruiten, Dai 2 hen, Meiji 4-10, Book 147, Hōmin 16, Keisatsu 4. Microform: Reel 004300, Frame 1207). 190 Gerald Figal, Civilization and Monsters: Spirits of Modernity in Meiji Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 7. 191 Susan Burns discusses the place of the body in relation to public health and the nation in her article “Constructing the National Body: Public Health and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Japan”, in Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities, edited by Timothy Brook and Andre Schmid (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 192 The following year, in 1874, it was renamed the Bureau of Hygiene and was made part of the Home Ministry (Naimushō).

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Europeans thought about sanitation and the spread of disease through contact. ‘Public health’ was already a key word while Nagayo was in Germany and upon his return to Japan he quickly reformed the government’s approach to questions of health and the body (a topic that will also come up in the following chapter through urban policy). An excerpt from Nagayo’s diary notes how the words ‘sanitation’ and ‘health’ impacted his views:

Eventually I came to understand that these words meant not only protection of the citizens’ health, but referred to the entire administrative system that was being organized to protect the citizens’ health---a system that relied not only on medicine but on physics, meteorology, and statistics, a system which operated through the state administration to eliminate threats to life and to improve the nation’s welfare.193

This rendering of the biopolitical state by Nagayo is closely connected to the policing of entertainment and how it brought the body to the forefront of state administration. The police became the enforcers of these new attitudes towards the body as they became responsible for the removal of the unsightly or the improper body.

Since the misemono performers often were the abnormal members of society displaying missing limbs or some type of deformity, they were obvious targets for the state’s drive to sanitize. On February 20th, 1870, the use of fabricated items (ganzōmono) was prohibited for use by misemono in order to stop freak shows from using props to scare their audiences—one example being the severed head of a long-necked lady (rokuro-kubi) who was a popular Edo period performer. Other practices that were outlawed by the government included coed sumo and sumo for blind people in November of 1872. The following year, it was decided to prohibit crippled performers like the armless men who did tricks with their feet (ashigei) such as playing

193 Translation is taken from Ann Bowman Janenetta’s article, “From Physician to Bureaucrat: The Case of Nagayo Sensai,” in New Directions in the Study of Meiji Japan, edited by Helen Hardacre and Adam L. Kern (New York: Brill, 1997), 159.

113 instruments or writing and drawing. These bodies were deemed unsightly by a state that wanted a population consisting of healthy bodies equalling a strong nation which was championed by authors like Takahashi Yoshio and Gotō Shimpei.194 Despite the attempt to remove these sights from the streets, the misemono retained their popularity at festivals and thus continued to operate in Tokyo. For example, in 1874 a kaichō lasting seventy days was held on the temple grounds of

Honjo Ekōin on the east side of Ryōgoku Bridge from April 2 to June 10. As shown in the table below, various carnival shows including strongman events, bear shows, life-sized dolls, human dolls and monkey shows entertained the crowds that overflowed the temple grounds. While no official attendance numbers are known, we can tell by the monetary offerings and the carnival show admission proceeds that the kaichō was still a popular event at the outset of the Meiji period.195

Table 3: 1874 Kaichō at Honjo Ekōin

Show Shell Bear Show Live Dolls Monkey Strongman Temple & 196 (days open) Crafts (44) (37) (37) Acrobats(50) (37) Icon(70)

Customers 188,110 29,933 26,589 33,142 21,735 unknown

Revenue(yen) 1,881.10 299.33 265.89 250.14 217.35 2,430

Data compiled from Yūbin Hōchi articles June 17 and July 25, 1874.197

194 Takahashi Yoshio, Nihon Jinshu Kairyōron (Tokyo: Jiji Shinpōsha, Maruzen, etc., 1884) and Gotō Shimpei, Kokka Eisei Genri (Tokyo, 1889). Commentary on these two author’s thoughts can be found in Sabine Fruhstuck, Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 20- 22. 195 The continuation of the kaichō into the Meiji period can also be thought of through display culture as commodities began to be displayed in department stores and the creation of modern museums including the National Museum in Ueno. See Noriko Aso, Public Properties: Museums in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 196 This combines two separate offerings together. One was for the Buddha that can heal sickness (Yakushinyorai) which totalled 280 yen and the remaining 2,150 yen was offered to the Shibayama Kannon.

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In response to the continued popularity of the misemono, despite the state’s distaste for these unsightly performances, various levels of government began to clamp down on the practice by enacting laws that sought to make these entertainers legible to the state. The first municipal laws regarding entertainment were aimed at stopping the practice of free admission to performances at playhouses and other types of misemono.198 Although the law first appeared in

Osaka in January of 1869, the following year Kanagawa and Tokyo followed suit by also prohibiting free admission to shows whether performed in playhouses or in the streets by misemono. In September of 1872, the newspaper Tokyo NichiNichi announced that Tokyo would start a licensed permit system to manage the entertainment industry in the city and the next month the governor of Tokyo, Ōkubo Ichiō, signed the new tax into law. All performers now needed to pay a registration fee of 3 yen in order to receive their licensed permit as well as pay a monthly 50 sen tax. For shows that performed in front of larger crowds like sumo, circus acts, or playhouses, there was a daily tax that was set at 2% of all collected admission fees. It seems as though the new law was strongly enforced as the number of permits jumped from 3,489 in 1880 to 12,232 in 1888.199 Naturally, failing to comply with the new law would result in fines and if

197 Meiji no Engei, Vol. 1, 127-132. 198 It appears as though this law was a precursor for the abolition of the class system that would occur in 1871 since it makes specific reference to those who carried swords as no longer being exempt from paying admission fees. 199 The numbers for 1880 come from Sumio Obinata, “Sangeinou to kenryoku,” 290, and the numbers for 1888 are from Meiji no Engei Vol. 4, edited by Asakura Yoshihiro (Tokyo: Kokuritsu Gekijyō Chōsa Yōseibu Geinō Chōsashitsu, 1980), 71.

115 one tried to deceive the city by fudging their numbers they were also liable to face a fine.200 If, for whatever reason the operator could not pay the fine in its entirety, they were subject to either being detained for 1-2 days or receive 10-20 whippings. While the permit system provided another source of revenue for the cash-strapped Meiji government, it also brought this population under the gaze and discipline of the state. In 1876, 10,960 people were charged in Tokyo for violating the new rules for entertainers.201 Despite the state’s modernizing slogan of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ (bunmei kaika) the act of plundering still necessitated the threat of violence in order to be carried out.

The taxing of misemono administrated by the licensing of permits performed the plundering aspect of the state’s mode of exchange but through this tax we can also see how a shift in modes of exchange historically emerged as the licensing system on entertainment seeped down to the very core of the process of exchange itself. In other words, we can catch a glimpse of how commodity exchange historically became the dominant form of exchange within the modern nation-state. This seeping down to the core of exchange is because of the position of labour power as a commodity in capitalism. Commodity exchange itself is not new and existed long before capitalist economies, however, when labour power as a commodity became the basis for the production of surplus value capitalism emerged as a system that appeared to be able to reproduce itself.202 Thus, the taxing of misemono through the licensed permit system not only

200 Failure to comply with the law had a fine between 75 to 150 sen and fudging numbers was a fine between 6.25 sen to 12.5 sen. Article 1 and 2 of ishikikaii jyourei (偉式詿偉条例) which was a Tokyo-to administrative order given on November 8, 1871. 201 Yoshimi Shun’ya, Toshi no Doramaturugi: Tokyo Sakariba no Shakaishi (Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha Publishers, 2008), 169. 202 For more on the unique character of labour power as a commodity and its relation to the reproduction of capital, see Uno Kōzō’s Kyōkōron.

116 acted as a way to police entertainment and for the state to plunder its share of the wealth, it also forced these performers to commodify their labour power in order to continue to participate in the commodity economy.

Although there were some travelling groups of misemono during the Edo period, the majority of performers prior to Meiji were one-man shows often by those who lived in the urban slums of the major cities.203 However, with the introduction of the permit system, these one-man shows often became connected with larger groups in permanent show houses as the state began to clamp down on misemono in general, first by limiting the size of the reed screen huts

(yoshizubari) and stalls set up in front of homes (tokomise) in 1872 and then by restricting them from the streets entirely in 1901. A further sign in the decline of the one-man show comes from the prefecture of Fukushima under the 1887 Regulations for the Management of Performers in which Article 4 states that all registered entertainers needed to notify the police when changing employers pointing to the vicarious nature of employment in the industry. While the selling of one’s labour power may not be the direct aim of the state’s policy towards entertainment, it nonetheless became fused together with capital through the common goal of producing surplus value. Thus, through the policing and taxing of entertainment, the disciplining of subjects to participate in the capitalist mode of exchange is made visible.

In conclusion, if we return to Nagano’s vision of transforming Yasukuni into ‘Tokyo’s

Acropolis’ we can see how elements of his blueprint invite us to think about the political economy of the shrine. The inclusion of the Roman-style forum not only formalized the role

Yasukuni played as an entertainment space in the capital but also connected the shrine to Japan’s

203 Kurata Yoshihiro, Bakamatsu Meiji Misemono Jiten (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2012), 3.

117 feudal past through the kaichō. Although there are some variances in the content of these events, the Annual Grand Festivals at Yasukuni Shrine reproduced the structure of the Edo kaichō, which is evident through a study of its political economy. I think this association with the kaichō is worth making since it not only offers a historical correlation regarding the use of entertainment at shrines during large festivities but also points to the necessity of exploring the economy of ritual just as Grapard urged. As was demonstrated with the collection of monetary offerings and the financial impact that they had on the shrine’s revenues, the economy of ritual and its relation to consumption adds another dimension to the shrine’s association with the state. However, since so much of the shrine’s revenues derived from non-state sources, it points to the necessity of examining Yasukuni Shrine’s political economy in order to understand its historical emergence as well as its ideological function.

So how should we conceptualize the presence of entertainment alongside the performance of rituals coordinated by the state? To begin, entertainment at the shrine cannot simply be treated as a spectacle on its own somehow cut off from the official state rituals as other scholars have suggested. Instead we need to further unfold how the state’s role in the construction of Yasukuni Shrine went beyond its ideological formation as a tool of nation- building. This chapter has attempted to do this by looking at the relation between various types of exchanges and the formation of Yasukuni as a social space.

By looking at the space of Yasukuni and the role of festivals not only in generating revenue but also in bringing together the Borromean rings of Capital-Nation-State, it becomes clearer how Nagano’s redesign of the shrine grounds really captured the logic of Yasukuni

Shrine during the Meiji period. The three spaces of nation, state and capital were carefully carved out in his sketches and within each space a dominant mode of exchange could be

118 pinpointed. Using modes of exchange to produce a critical methodology allows us to determine exactly what kind of space was being produced through the various offerings, rituals, or performances that were undertaken at the shrine. While the three modes of exchange discussed here are all connected to the political aims of the Meiji state, the differences in their ideological function is important as each mode of exchange would have interpellated the subjects who entered that space differently. Thus Yasukuni Shrine can be depicted as a space that captured the coming together of Capital-Nation-State during the pivotal early years of the Meiji government which were essential for forming and disciplining modern subjects.

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Chapter 3 Grounding Yasukuni

It’s good to buy and hold onto land, if you do so, I’ve been told that the value will certainly increase. At this time (circa 1869) Tokyo’s land value is dirt cheap (nisokusanmon). It’s said that any respectable estate with a gated storehouse costs only 2.5 sen per tsubo but at that time nobody felt like buying up land. This was something that Ōmura Masujirō realized early. Even though 2.5 sen per tsubo would have been fairly expensive at that time, by 1919 the land in the vicinity of Nihonbashi was supposedly bought for 15,000 yen per tsubo. I think that with this one example you can truly understand Ōmura’s foresight (senken).

- Murata Munejirō 204

Government bonds are capital only for the person who has bought them, to whom they represent his purchase price, the capital he has invested in them. They are not capital in themselves, but simply creditor’s claims; if they are in mortgages, they are simply claims on future payments of ground-rent; and if they are stocks of some other kind, they are simply property titles which give the holder a claim to future surplus value. None of these things are genuine capital, they do not constitute any component of capital and are also in themselves not values.

-Karl Marx205

With everything that has been written about Yasukuni Shrine in the postwar, rarely is the land that it is located on ever discussed. Of course there are some scholars who look at the location of Yasukuni and the history of why that specific place was chosen or the architectural structures placed on the land, but these approaches treat the land as a given; something that appears natural and already there. But land is never just an empty space that stands outside of the social relations of a given society. It is always tied to the material demands of its population and thus it reflects how a society organizes itself. This is particularly visible during the transition from agricultural societies to industrial ones as arable land which was once highly valued under

204 Murata Munejirō, Ōmura Masujirō Sensei Jiseki (Tokyo: Murata Munejirō, 1919), 131. 205 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 3, translated by David Fernbach (New York: Penguin Classics, 1991), 590.

120 the feudal structure now competed with land appropriated for factories, modes of transportation such as trains or the extraction of other resources from the earth. A key aspect of this transformation into an industrial society was uniting capital and land so that the wealth obtained from the land was not simply derived from production but also through exchange. By making land into a commodity that could be freely bought and sold on the market, the Meiji government brought forth a shift in social relations which not only changed the class structure of society but also its physical appearance. Given that the Yasukuni Shrine grounds were first demarcated and later developed during the Meiji period, this chapter will argue that the shrine can offer us a glimpse of how the land reforms transformed the spatial organization of Tokyo. Thus, despite its exclusion by contemporary scholarship, an inquiry into the land can illuminate how the shrine itself fits into the logic of Meiji urban development and more importantly with the emergence of finance capital.

Central to any discussion on the organization of land in modern Japan is the Land Tax

Reform of 1873. These reforms were integral for the Meiji state as it asserted their authority over the land which made the imagination of a national space possible as well as balancing the state’s finances by staking a claim on the collection of rent. Given its importance, the land reforms have received a lot of attention from historians and economists alike. While some focus on the social implications that resulted from the institution of private property and the subsequent dispossession of the peasantry, others note how important taxation was for government revenues of which the land tax accounted for roughly 80% over the first decade after 1873. However, most of this scholarship focusses on the effect the land reforms had on rural Japan in what is generally termed as the agrarian question (nōgyō mondai) whereas the urban areas of Japan have, in

121 comparison, been largely ignored.206 Only since the 1990s have historians turned their focus to the impact of the land reforms in Japan’s urban areas but even these works are limited.207

In the English language, there are no texts that are dedicated to the land reforms in urban areas but some scholarship does touch on aspects of this history through studies on urban planning. However, most of these works are generally limited to an examination of government policy with very little analysis of the implications of their effect on social relations within the city. Perhaps the most well-known is André Sorensen’s book The Making of Urban Japan where he criticizes a heavy-handed centralized government for stifling the emergence of private actors in producing urban policies. Sorensen concludes that the absence of such agents of civil society resulted in poor and stagnating living conditions for much of Tokyo’s urban population while the government focussed on investments in infrastructure that was directly related to flows of capital. Another work that touches on urban planning issues in Tokyo is Edward Seidensticker’s

Low City, High City, which is a cultural history that offers an anecdotal approach to what he calls the ‘westernization of Tokyo’. However, this tends to be a descriptive text with very little reflection on the broader implications that the introduction of technology such as the electric trams would have had on urban space.

206 The most well-known text regarding the agrarian question would be Ōuchi Tsutomu’s Nihon Shihonshugi no Nōgyō Mondai (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1949) and in English E. Herbert Norman, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern State: Political and Economic Problems of the Meiji Period (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000). 207 See Fukuda Yasuo, Tochi no Shōhinka to tochi mondai (Tokyo: Dōbunkan, 1993); Morita Hideki, “Meiji Shonen, Tokyo Shigaichi ni okeru Chika Santei Seisaku no Tenkai,” Mita Gakkai Zasshi, Vol. 86, No.2 (July, 1993); Yamada Hiroyuki [et al.], Toshi to Tochi no Keizaigaku (Tokyo: Nihon Hyōronsha, 1995); Takishima Isao, Toshi to Chiso Kaisei (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2003). For more specific works on urban planning in Tokyo see Ishida Yorifusa, Nihon Kindai Toshi Keikaku no Hyakunen (Tokyo: Jichitai Kenkyūsha, 1987); Fujimori Terunobu, Meiji no Tokyo Keikaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990); Ishizuka Hiromichi, Nihon Kindai Toshiron: Tokyo, 1868-1923 (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1991).

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Whereas the previous two authors approach their work on Japanese urban space through a comparison with western cities, Henry D. Smith and Jinnai Hidenobu try to think about

Japanese urban space through a positivist approach instead of explaining what Japanese cities are not. Smith looks at Tokyo from the Tokugawa period into the early Showa era to point out the various political, religious and aesthetic influences which Japanese thinkers contributed to the idea of the city while Jinnai, an architectural historian, produces what he calls a ‘spatial anthropology’ of the city, which connects the post-Meiji Restoration city of Tokyo closely to its feudal version, Edo. Although his work offers many interesting insights, in the end, he only gives a topographical perspective of the city determined strictly through culture and leaves out any type of human agency or even institutional agenda. Building on this body of scholarship, my research will not only introduce the land reforms in an urban context to an English speaking audience but it will also include a materialist approach to urban planning that goes beyond a history of government policy. As actual policies regarding urban planning only began in the late

1880s to a limited degree due to the state’s fiscal restrictions and then not until the 1910s when a more comprehensive urban planning policy was introduced to deal with a growing urban population, the Meiji period marks a moment when the state was not directly involved in shaping the urban space of the city through policy. I italicise the word directly to emphasize that although urban planning policies were generally absent during this period, the state’s implementation of the land reforms had already instituted a logic and systematic approach to organizing urban space. In fact, by the time the city actually implemented urban policies in 1888, the built environment of Tokyo had already been organized by finance capital to the point that landlords resisted any state intervention unless it was to expand the general infrastructure. Thus, this chapter will comment on the relation between state and capital by examining how policy interacts with the built environment.

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The geographer David Harvey uses the term ‘built environment’ to understand how the capitalist mode of production organizes space by entrenching use values into the physical landscape in order to facilitate the production, exchange and consumption of commodities.208

This results in the formation of various types of structures such as factories, shopping malls, houses, roads, power stations, railways or airports, which are all spatially determined in relation to each other. The spatial relation aspect is important because this is what helps valorize capital which in turn organizes land to its best and highest use. In other words, the spatial organization determines the amount of rent that can be appropriated which directs where capital should be allocated to receive the highest return. Key to this arrangement is treating the land as a pure financial asset, or as Marx explained, as fictitious capital. Once land becomes a pure financial asset it is able to absorb large amounts of interest-bearing capital allowing for the creation of a land market that is dependent on rent yields. In the words of Harvey,

ground-rent, capitalized as the interest on some imaginary capital, constitutes the ‘value’ of the land. What is bought and sold is not the land, but title to the ground-rent yielded by it. The money laid out is equivalent to an interest-bearing investment. The buyer acquires a claim upon anticipated future revenues, a claim upon the future fruits of labour. Title to the land becomes, in short, a form of fictitious capital.209

In essence rent is what forms the basis of land value by connecting it to future surplus value in the realm of production which necessitates some discussion of the role of financiers in the organization of land and labour. This brings us back to the relation between nation and capital as the land reforms forged new class relations across Japan. In particular, the Meiji land reforms helped forge the interests of two groups, the landowners and the merchant class, who then

208 David Harvey, The Limits of Capital (New York: Verso, 2006), 233. 209 Ibid., 367.

124 emerged as a homogenized mass to champion the government’s push to institutionalize a commodity economy through their participation in the land market. It was this class that helped shape the spatial organization of Tokyo through the formation of land markets and land speculation as well as financing the built environment through purchasing government bonds, stocks, or offering mortgages and credit loans. It is this relation between rent, labour and capital that will be examined in regards to the history of Yasukuni Shrine in order to show how it played a role in developing land markets as well as setting labour in motion.

To begin this investigation into the commodification of land in Meiji Tokyo, I will introduce what was first considered a serious policy problem: what to do with the developed yet unused land in the city? From there I will turn to the land reforms to look at how the state began to reorganize the urban space of Tokyo and then conclude with the effect that this had on social relations through the issue of land rent. Throughout this discussion, Yasukuni Shrine will assist in tying together these narrative threads through its connection to the emerging capitalist class as well as its land management as the shrine also participated in and helped give shape to the land market in Tokyo. Thus, this chapter will begin to unfold how Capital-Nation-State as a fused entity leaves its trace not only on the shrine grounds but also on the built environment of the city.

3.1 Transferring the Capital (Sento) Debate

Prior to the announcement of the renaming of Tokyo on July 17, 1868, a debate about moving the capital had already been brewing since January of the same year. The general consensus was that the conservative nature of the court in Kyoto would prove to be too restrictive for the ambitions of the new Meiji government and, therefore, the capital should be

125 moved so that sovereign power and political power could be united under one roof.210 However, there was little consensus as to where the capital should be moved. While some of the leading statesmen of the emerging Meiji government thought Osaka would be an appropriate location for the new capital given its proximity to the former capitals of Kyoto and Nara, others pushed for the capital to be moved to Edo allowing for some continuity with the former Tokugawa regime.

In the end, Edo was chosen to be the new capital and the reasons behind this decision were driven by a desire to construct a national urban space.

Following the decisive victory by the imperial forces at the Battle of Toba-Fushimi on

January 3, 1868, the merchants of Osaka who had been financially supporting both sides of the civil war finally threw their full support behind the Meiji regime. This was an important factor in shifting the momentum of the war since the imperial forces were running into some supply issues as funding from the western provinces was beginning to dry up. On January 12, Mitsuoka

Hachirō (1829-1912) loaned three million ryō (a gold coin weighing about 18 grams) to the restoration government and only five days later their support for the movement was given recognition by a leading government statesman in An Argument for Relocating the Capital to

Osaka (Naniwa Sento Ron).211 In this text, Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830-1878) contended that Osaka would make a better capital than Kyoto for three main reasons: first, because it could house both the Military and Navy Ministries due to its location on the coast; second, the port would also make it easy to enter into diplomatic relations with various countries; and third, the city offered a more strategic location (chi no ri). Even though this caused a stir in the court, Emperor Meiji

210 Fujitani writes that the impetus to move the capital out of Kyoto was tied to ‘imperial progress’ (junkō) with the aim of making the emperor a visible ruler to the masses instead of being “kept behind jeweled curtains” in Kyoto. In Splendid Monarchy, 42-46. 211 Mitsuoka later changed his name to Yuri Kimimasa and became a leading accountant for the Meiji government.

126 announced plans to visit Osaka on March 5 ahead of the siege on Tokyo. For the people of

Kyoto, this act alone signalled that the process of moving the capital had already begun and in response, they publicly expressed their furor. However, for the time being, their fears were found to be unproven as the emperor only remained in Osaka until April 4 after which he returned to

Kyoto.

In opposition to Okubo’s idea was Maejima Hisoka (1835-1919) who created his own plan in An Argument for Relocating the Capital to Edo (Edo Sento Ron) and sent it directly to

Ōkubo on March 10 prior to the fall of Edo. Maejima argued that Osaka’s streets were too narrow and cramped with houses which would make it difficult to undertake any urban projects.

He was specifically concerned that it would be impossible to find suitable locations for all of the government institutions that would have to be transferred from Kyoto. These infrastructure issues made it difficult for any redesign of Osaka’s urban space which led Maejima to conclude, contrary to Ōkubo’s argument, that the city would be impossible to defend militarily.212 Instead,

Maejima suggested that Edo would be a better choice since it not only had a developed local economy but also had the space to properly set up a government. Given that the city was full of large estates, Maejima imagined that it would be easy for the new government to buy the land up since some of that land had already been abandoned by the daimyo and their retainers

(hatamoto). No doubt the image of an emptied out space that could be easily shaped to fit the aspirations of state bureaucrats was appealing to many members of the new Meiji government.

212 Kitajima Hidetomo (1842-1877) added to Maejima’s argument for Edo by stressing that the rebels in the northeast had yet to be suppressed and that moving the military command to Tokyo would help in defeating the north.

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With the renaming of Edo to Tokyo in July of 1868, it was officially announced that the capital would be moved to the eastern side of Japan.

After twenty-two days of travel along the Tōkaidō, the arrival of the emperor in Tokyo in

October 1868 was met with awe and uncertainty. By the end of the summer, Edo was a mess having had a section of the northeast of the city destroyed, a military government overrun and then replaced by another occupying force, and, in the meantime, had its name officially changed.

For those who remained in the city there would have been much anticipation of what the arrival of the emperor would mean but on that day very little was presented to them. On the morning of

October 13th, Emperor Meiji and his retinue of 2300 attendants made their way from Shinagawa to Edo Castle under the gaze of many of the townspeople who lined the streets to watch. The

Japan Times’ Overland Mail gave this account of that morning:

All classes of Japanese, high and low, were present, most of them in holiday apparel…. And now a great silence fell upon the people. Far as the eye could see on either side, the roadsides were densely packed with the crouching populace…. And as the train had moved between them, kuges and Daimios, troops and warriors and statesmen, they had looked on in comparative quiet, a murmur of conversation in an under tone and constant slight restlessness of movement betokening the general interest. But as the Phoenix Car, with its strange crest shimmering in the sunlight and with its halo of glittering attendants, came on, circling it like the sun-rays, the people, without order or signal, turned their faces to the earth, the Foreign-Office officials, who had hitherto stood upright beside us few Europeans, sank into the same position and no man moved or spake for a space, and all seemed to hold their breath for very awe, as the mysterious Presence, on whom few are privileged to look and live, was passing slowly by.213

Despite the power and presence of the emperor that was displayed during the procession into the castle, it is hard to gage the opinions regarding the new regime of those who called Edo home.

213 The Japan Times’ Overland Mail, December 2, 1868.

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While the procession itself invoked a reverent response, a rhyme that mocked the reign of the new emperor had gained some resonance with the city folk. The move to ‘one rule one name’ represented by the declaration of the Meiji (meaning ‘bright rule’) period began on September 8 of that year but it quickly was given a different reading from those in Edo: “Read from above it may mean bright rule, but read from below, it means ungoverned by anyone (osamarumei).”214

This pun, as M. William Steele has suggested, demonstrated that some of the Edo townsfolk were still pro-Tokugawa and at the same time it expressed “their contempt for any form of political authority.”215 To win favour with the occupied city, the emperor announced that a celebration would be held on November 6th and 7th. Ten days prior to that date 2,563 barrels of alcohol were delivered to the 1,592 neighbourhoods of the city in preparation. The plan seemed to work as the party had the atmosphere of a festival and it continued throughout the night. In contrast to the celebrations in Tokyo, the people of Kyoto would once again protest the decision to move the capital to Tokyo the following February by causing an uproar and putting the city in disorder (sōzen).216 Nonetheless, despite their discontent with the decision, Tokyo became the home of the Meiji government and now the focus would shift to constructing a new capital.

214 Tokyo Hyakunenshi Iinkai, Tokyo Hyakunenshi, Vol. 2, (Tokyo, 1972-73), 310. Also quoted in M. William Steele, “Edo in 1868: The View from Below,” Monumenta Nipponica, Vol. 45, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), 150. 215 Ibid., 150. 216 Tokyo-to Henshū, Meiji Shonen no Bukechi Shori Mondai (Tokyo: Tokyo City, 1965), 22.

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3.2 The Samurai Estate Issue (Bukechi Shori Mondai)

With the surrender of the bakufu the imperial regime effectively took control of all

Tokugawa land, which amounted to roughly one-quarter of Japan at the time. This included all of

Edo, the administrative center, and for many it became the logical location to set up a new capital city. While the emperor took up residence in what was renamed Tokyo Castle, many of his political and military advisors also acquired residences near the castle. As was discussed briefly in the first chapter, the city of Edo had gone through a turbulent decade due to the decline of the Tokugawa bakufu. Henry Smith notes that the city’s population went through three stages of decline beginning with the end of the alternate attendance system (sankin kōtai) in 1862 when

100,000 people departed. They were followed by 50,000 domain samurai over the next six years and then finally in 1868 over 300,000, almost two-thirds being shogunal retainers, exited the city.217 Thus, over the period of seven short years, the city of Edo lost almost half of its population of one million residents. It was this mass exodus that created the conditions for the foundation of a new capital and is what many of the Meiji bureaucrats found appealing about this urban space.

The space of the city of Edo was segregated into three distinct sections: samurai estates, shrine and temple grounds, and the town area consisting mainly of merchants and tradesmen.

The samurai estates alone accounted for roughly seventy percent of all land in the city and if you add the fifteen percent of land that was owned by the shrines and temples, it meant that almost eighty-five percent of the city consisted of tax-free property. As soon as the imperial army settled

217 Henry Smith, “The Edo-Tokyo Transition: In Search of Common Ground,” in Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, edited by Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 347.

130 into the city they took an interest in surveying the land that was now officially under their control. In April 1868, a survey of the estates collecting information about their location, status of the samurai and the number of men and women as well as servants (ashigaru and komono) was carried out by the occupation government. It was decided that all han would be able to keep one estate near the castle and that the larger han would be allowed two more estates as long as they were outside the castle district. By this time, many of the more prominent daimyo and their retainers had already departed the city but, for those who remained, the question was whether or not they were still loyal to the bakufu or were open to the new regime. While there was definitely distrust and uncertainty between the two groups, following the defeat of the Shōgitai at the Battle of Ueno as was discussed in the first chapter, the occupational government seemed to relax their stance towards the shogunal retainers and allowed them to continue to live in their residences. As a further gesture of goodwill to win them over, the new government also delayed the collection of any land rents for a period of one year.218

Since the ownership of the land was directly transferred from the bakufu to the interim military government, it should come as no surprise that many of the leaders wasted no time in acquiring their own accommodations. Many of the available properties were situated near the castle including some that were adjacent to what would later become the Yasukuni Shrine grounds. For example, two of the more prominent leaders out of Chōshū, Kido Takayoshi (1833-

1877) and Yamagata Aritomo (1838-1922), moved into residences within a stone’s throw of the shrine. In general, the government leaders took whatever land they wanted and, if necessary, the current residents were even evicted. After the military and political leaders selected their

218 Meiji Shonen no Bukechi Shori Mondai, 34-35.

131 properties of choice, houses were then offered to lower ranking government officials. Depending on their rank, they were given residences that ranged in size from 15-80 tsubo, which was later expanded to between 100-400 tsubo. Moving the capital to Tokyo also meant a major uprooting of public officials which included members of the royal family. Over the next decade, various branches of the royal family made the move to Tokyo including the Fushimi-no-miya and the

Kan’in-no-miya families who took over large residences (2452 tsubo and 3038 tsubo, respectively) near the Yasukuni Shrine grounds.219 However, despite the mass migration of government officials, the majority of the samurai estates remained empty and began to fall into disrepair.

The problem was that the state did not have the financial resources to maintain all of these buildings so the official policy regarding the samurai estates often changed as they tried to turn this land into productive use. One of the earlier infamous policies was the mulberry and tea edict in August of 1869. The government promoted the planting of mulberry trees (kuwa) and tea shrubs on the grounds of the estates so as to make these properties profitable. While the plan was criticized as a step in the wrong direction for a state that wanted to encourage industrialization, it is estimated that almost nine percent of the old estates were planted over with bushes. By

February of 1870, the focus had shifted from planting to offloading some of the expenses associated with the cost of maintaining the land. Now those who lived on the land were responsible for its upkeep and for any demolition of buildings. After 1871, with the abolition of the han system, the former daimyo were ordered to return to Tokyo and were given the chance to buy back estates at lowered prices (harai-sage). These policies came to an end in 1873 as the

219 For more on the royal families and their land acquisitions in Tokyo, see Suzuki Hiroyuki, Mieru Toshi/Mienai Toshi: Machizukuri, Kenchiku, Monyumento (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996), 23-24.

132 land reforms were introduced and land ownership now was conducted through the purchasing and selling of land certificates.

3.3 The Space of Kudan Hill

In June of 1869, a plot of land was allocated by the city for the construction of a shōkonsha to the north of the old Edo castle outside of Tayasu Gate (this land was referred to as the Tayasudai). While most of this land was previously owned by the bakufu, parts of it contained hatamoto residences and also some shops of tradesmen. As was mentioned in the first chapter, the land was surveyed on June 12th and was received by the shrine one week later. The allotment included all of Fujimicho District 3 (17, 743 tsubo), a section of Fujimicho District 2

(2,288 tsubo), and a section of Iidamachi District 2 (1,659 tsubo) for a total of 21,690 tsubo (17.7 acres). Originally the altar and other sacred objects from the ceremony held in Edo castle were set up where the statue of Ōmura Masujirō stands today, which was already crown land

(goyōchi). The land directly to the west of this space was a bakufu military training ground for cavalry (baba) and past that stood a number of residences. The permanent Main Hall (honden) which was completed in 1872 was built where the residences once stood. Roughly thirty plots would have been affected by the expansion of the shrine grounds but as Murakami Shigeyoshi notes most of these hatamoto had already returned to Shizuoka and we can assume that the remaining tenants would have simply been evicted.220 Thus, by 1872, the shrine grounds had

220 Murakami, Irei to Shokan, 48.

133 already taken a familiar shape to its appearance today. But how was this land used prior to the

Meiji period?

As was discussed in the first chapter, following the Great Meireki Fire in 1657, the town of Edo increasingly started to sprawl westward. This included the area of Ichigaya, which, by

1713, was formally included in the city limits. Hence, by this point, the area of Fujimicho and

Iidamachi was already densely populated, most likely through the system of alternate attendance.

Prior to this period, there are also records of a library that was constructed in Fujimicho on the eve of the Edo period. In 1602, a library was built and books from the famous Kanazawa Bunko in Yokohama were moved to this site.221 Later in the Edo period this land was also used for training samurai in the art of Japanese swords (kenjyutsu). In 1826, at the foot of Kudan Hill

Saitō Yakurō (1798-1871), a peasant from what is now Toyama who had become a famous swordsman, opened a new training ground.222 By 1839, the school, called the Renpeikan, was moved to the top of Kudan Hill and became known as one of the three Great Kenjyutsu Dōjōs of the Edo-bakumatsu period. Later, in 1869, the same year that the Tokyo Shōkonsha was built, a man who worked for the property department of Mitsui, Nagaoka Jinbee, was awarded a permit to operate a pleasure quarter near the horse racing grounds of the shrine. This was later developed into an area for what was known as the three forms of entertainment (sangyō): food

(ryōtei), geisha houses (okiya) and designated meeting spots (machiai chaya). Although there is very little written about this particular entertainment district (especially in the shrine archives), it

221 The Kanazawa Bunko was first constructed in 1275 and contained a collection of Japanese and Chinese art objects. It was one of the major learning centers during the Edo period. Kōjimachi Kushi (Tokyo: Tokyo-shi Kōjimachi-ku, 1935), 52. 222 Saitō was the fourth successor of the Shindō Munenryū school and had a reputation as being one of the best swordsman in the city. Despite the fact that he trained over 3000 men to fight the imperial forces on behalf of the Shogun, Saitō was later employed by the Meiji government.

134 seems like it was a popular place among its clientele. In fact, on three different occasions during the 1870s, the Yomiuri Shinbun announced that the Fujimicho pleasure quarter was so overwhelmed by customers that girls (shōgi) from the neighbouring Nezu Matsubarō were brought in to satisfy the demand during the festivals.223 It is hard to determine how long

Nagaoka was involved in this business but, from other research done on hanakai areas in Tokyo, it is known that the business in Fujimicho was one of the top ten most popular places in the city by 1929.224

Given the connections that the land on top of Kudan Hill previously had to military training, the production of knowledge, as well as entertainment, I would argue that, in terms of how the land was used, there is no break between the Edo and Meiji periods. In fact, as was illustrated in chapter two, the building of Yasukuni Shrine on top of Kudan Hill brought all of these characteristics into one space with the militaristic nature of the shrine combined with the library and museum as well as the performance of misemono at festivals. The historical use of the land that Yasukuni Shrine sits on shows the connections it has to its feudal past but with the coming of the Meiji government this space was conceptually being reconfigured in order to conform to a new logic of spatial organization that was introduced through the land reforms.

223 The three instances appeared in the morning edition of the July 10, 1876, July 10, 1878, and the November 6, 1878 papers. 224 This is determined by the number of geisha that were employed which was around 340.

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3.4 Land Tax Reform of 1873

The agrarian question in Japanese history has been an object of study for much of the twentieth century in both English and Japanese scholarship. Much of this scholarship has examined the socio-economic aspect of the land reforms and the impact it had on peasant living conditions with the collapse of the feudal land system. In fact it was this very issue that became a fixation for those who participated in the debates on Japanese capitalism within the communist party in the 1920s and 1930s fighting over whether Japan had lost or retained its feudal past.225

However, to some extent, this debate ignored the city and it has only been recently that the history of land reforms in urban areas of Japan has been undertaken. This section will build on the scholarship of both rural and urban experiences of the land reforms by looking at the concentration of landownership in Tokyo during the Meiji period in order to assess how landowners played an important role in the development of capitalism in Japan. In contrast to the class battle between landowners and capitalists in England during the first half of the eighteenth century, in Japan, the landowning class and the capitalist class were more often than not the same people. Following Uno Kozo’s argument on the stages of capitalist development, I argue that this was because Japan’s drive to transform its feudal economy into a capitalist one occurred during the stage of imperialism when finance capital was the basis for the accumulation of wealth.

Similar to how E. H. Norman claimed that an industrial capitalist class did not emerge in Japan because of the special relationship between the state and the great banking houses, a division

225 See Germaine A. Hoston, Marxism and the Crisis of Development in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

136 between the landowning and capitalist classes was not necessary simply because the landowning class had a special relationship to the banks.226

The ownership of land prior to the Meiji Restoration has generally been classified as a feudal system that was closely tied to the state. Since the Taika Reforms of 645, in principle all land belonged to the central government and was dispersed to each farming family according to their age and number. While this system allowed for a regular redistribution of land which resisted the formation of private property rights, it also required a stable and strong central government to enforce it. However, once factions began to assert influence locally, the power of the centralized government decreased and the right to collect taxes from land fell to those who had the military force to defend it. This era tended to produce a monopolization of land under single lords since the powerful fiefs swallowed up the weaker ones thus consolidating their rule.

Nonetheless, this led to a centralization of power once again under the Tokugawa government as they took control through various alliances with feudal lords which allowed for the establishment of a clear set of principles regarding land ownership.

Beginning with the cadastral survey by Hideyoshi in the 1580s, which distinguished the division of land between the peasants and the non-landowning warrior class and was later validated by the prohibition of selling peasant holdings in 1643, land was guaranteed to the peasant through primogeniture inheritance. Although this assured the peasant a certain level of subsistence, they were also tied to the land by the ban on land alienation as well as the bans on general movement (travel) in Tokugawa Japan. The Tokugawa land system was structured to maintain land ownership eternally but being unable to sell the land exasperated the situation for

226 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 114.

137 those who found themselves in debt. The rise of the merchant class through the growth of a commodity economy placed them in the position of the money-lender and they, although contrary to Tokugawa regulations, were often allowed to purchase the land from peasants who could not meet their debt obligations.227 After becoming owners of the land, the merchants generally made the former owners their tenants and simply collected rent. This process of transforming peasants from de facto landowners into tenants continued throughout the nineteenth century and by 1870, rural tenancy rates were about 30%. This was the condition of land ownership in the countryside of Japan leading up to the Meiji Restoration in 1868.

In the cities, land ownership took a different form than their feudal rural counterparts.

The city, or castle town, was the domain of the daimyos and the shogun and thus the townsfolk were not guaranteed land as their rural counterparts. Since most of the inhabitants worked in the trades or were merchants, they did not make their living off the land and thus were more dependent on the use of money as the medium of exchange in a commodity based economy.

Money exchange had grown considerably throughout the Tokugawa period as the commodity economy expanded. As a result, the fiscal policy of the bakufu in the first half of the nineteenth century was aimed at increasing the amount of money in circulation by collecting large amounts of seigniorage. Between 1818-1829 and 1832-1837, the bakufu issued new currency, which increased the stock of money by 60% and 20%, respectively. This led to an increase in the price of rice which, for the daimyo and samurai, it meant that their stipends almost doubled in value.

The expansion of the monetary currency also favoured the businesses of the merchants from the

227 Ronald Dore notes that this was generally allowed because the merchants, who were often village headmen or rural capitalists, were also the creditors for the daimyo. Ronald Dore, Land Reform in Japan (London: Athlone, 1984), 12-13.

138 established houses like Mitsui to the small shops operated by those who moved to the city and opened new businesses.228

In contrast to the peasants, the merchants were able to use their monetary wealth to purchase land. In return they received a deed of sale (kokenchi) from the bakufu and were free to sell the land to other merchants or build tenements, which could house rural peasants who had left the countryside for a new life in the city. Nakafuji Atsushi notes that the buying and selling of land reached its peak in Edo around 1800.229 The property that commanded the highest value was the land next to the main streets in the commercial district since these were coveted by other merchants which allowed for a certain degree of land speculation to occur. Washizaki Shuntarō’s research on the investments in Edo real estate points to how land was already being used as a commodity and thus was susceptible to periodic crises.230 Paving the way for such crises was the decrease in money for commercial transactions, a reduction in interest rates, and an increase in printing money led to a rise in real land values in the eighteenth century. This was followed by a crash in land value in the nineteenth century, which Washizaki concludes was a product of real estate speculation by merchants. However, despite the growing land market that had emerged throughout the Tokugawa period, the exchange of land was still too limited in scope since the majority of Tokyo’s residents could not participate in this economy. To the lower level ministers,

228 Ihara Saikaku tells the story of Hayashi Kan’emon who is a merchant who gets into financial trouble and has to borrow money. Months later he stumbles across a new invention, the ‘pocket lighter’, and makes so much money that he moves to Edo and opens up his own bank. Ihara Saikaku, “Secrets of Turning Mushrooms Into Money,” in Some Final Words of Advice, translated by Peter Nosco (Rutland, Vt: C. E. Tuttle Co., 1980), 45-55. 229 Nakafuji looks at four different city districts around Kyōbashi and illustrates how even the merchants at a lower economic status participated in the buying and selling of properties which helped pushed up land value. Nakafuji Atsushi, “Edo Chōninchi ni okeru tochi shoyū hendō no Chiikiteki Sai,” Rekishi Chiri Gakkai, Vol. 134 (September 1986), 31-42. 230 Washizaki Shuntarō, “Edo no Tochi Shijyo to Fudōsan Tōshi: Shūeki Kangenhou ni yoru Chidai—Chika Bunseki,” Shakai Keizai Shigaku, Vol. 73, No.2 (July 2007), 147-162.

139 law enforcers (yoriki), courtesans (okujyochū), physicians and even monks (jyusha) the bakufu often bestowed land under the condition that it could not be sold or rented out. For the peasants and less well-off merchants who could not afford to enter the land market because of the large outlay of capital that it required, they were forced to seek out tenements for rent. Besides the wealthy merchants, only the daimyo and shogunate retainers (bakushin) could acquire land freely and dispose of it as they wished.231

The Land Tax Reform of 1873 contained elements of former Tokugawa practices and at the same time it transformed social relations. The reforms are often cited as the most important initiative of the Meiji government since it would serve as the main source of government revenues for the next few decades.232 After all, the newly formed government in Tokyo was in desperate need of money as it not only needed to pay back debt accrued through the Boshin War but it also had to put resources into expanding its military force to protect its claim to authority over the land from both domestic rebellions and foreign powers. The Boshin War was also a heavy burden on many of the former han, which in the years after 1868 declared bankruptcy and had to be made solvent by the state.233 On top of all of this, the government also had to pay everyday expenses like salaries to its officials as well as to the samurai class (which accounted for almost 7% of the total population), which continued to receive stipends until they were commuted into interest-bearing bonds in 1876. Given these financial restrictions solidifying a steady stream of revenues through the land tax was central to the survival of the Meiji state.

231 Ibid., 152. 232 In the first few years, it accounted for over 90% of government revenues and it stayed above the 50% mark until 1895. 233 The han loans amounted to roughly 19.5 million yen. Ōmori Tōru, “Meiji Shoki no Zaisei Kōzō Kaikaku— Ruiseki Saimu Shori to sono Eikyō,” Kinyū Kenkyū, Vol. 20, No. 3 (September 2001), 135.

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3.5 The Land Reforms and Tokyo

At the beginning of the Meiji period, urban land tax only accounted for 1.8% of all the tax collected from private property across the country.234 Given that it accounted for so little of the total land tax revenues, the importance of the reforms in Japan’s urban areas has, relatively speaking, received little attention. While the tax reforms might not have produced as much revenue in urban areas, it would be a mistake to think that they had no impact on the social space of Japan’s cities. Just as the reforms drastically restructured social relations in the countryside as was argued by E. H. Norman, they also had a profound effect in reorganizing the social relations and space of the city. This can be seen through an analysis of how the land reforms continued the monopolization of land by a particular social class and then how land valuation by the state helped spur land transactions resulting in speculation for profit. Not only did this shape the space of the city by organizing it into areas that attracted large amounts of investments while others remained somewhat barren, it also transformed social relations as the monopolization of land led to an increase of rental properties and disputes between landlords and tenants.

In the city of Tokyo, the reforms began with the issuing of land certificates (chiken), which was announced in January of 1872. The main goal of distributing the land certificates was to determine ownership but it also acted as a survey of the city which helped the government determine how to tackle complicated issues like what to do with the samurai estates. With the distribution of the land certificates, the residents of Tokyo were also informed that they would now be paying a land tax that would equal 2% of the land value. Despite the fact that this was already a lower rate than what rural properties were going to be taxed, there was enough of an

234 The amount was only ¥918,191.85 out of ¥49,462,945.45.

141 outcry that the city later lowered it to 1% just six months later.235 However, this concession by the Grand Council of State only added to the confusion and disorder of the initial reforms since it appeared to give favour to the capital at the expense of the rest of the country. Thus, in August of

1875, it was announced that there would be a correction (kōsei) of the tax rate by raising it to

3%, putting it in line with the rest of the country.236 Naturally this was met with a lot of opposition by those with large landholdings and in particular by the merchants who also had to contend with the introduction of a commodity tax (buppinzei). In an editorial printed by the

Tokyo NichiNichi Shinbun on October 3, 1875, the public discontent over the flip-flopping of the government is clearly evident. The editorial has the tone of a declaration as it begins with “We, the people of Tokyo” (Gosō, Tokyo no jinmin) and goes on to give six reasons why the increase of the land tax should be withdrawn. While three of the reasons focus on the 300% increase and how there were already other taxes that were a financial burden (like the commodity tax or the

1% ward tax), the other three points of contention stress general problems that resulted from turning land into a commodity. The first of these three issues was how land was being assessed in relation to the arable land of the countryside. The author points out that it is unreasonable to compare cultivated (kōsaku) land with city land since they are not equal in terms of the profits that can be produced. Therefore, it would make sense for urban land to be taxed at a lower rate than rural land since it would not be directly used to produce profits. The second reason was that since land value in Tokyo was already steadily increasing due to the constant buying and selling of property, the revenues gained from the tax rate would always be increasing incrementally.

235 Rural tax rates were set at 3% but were later lowered to 2.5% in 1878 after numerous protests. Compared to Tokugawa period tax rates which were between 50-60% of crop yield, the 3% tax amounted to roughly 35% of an average crop. The lowering of the tax rate benefited the landowners as they often still collected rent in kind which was around 50% of the crop. 236 Daijyōkan No. 133, April 25, 1872.

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This meant that there would be no reason to gouge landowners now as revenues would naturally increase over time. The final reason that the author delineates points to the degree that land speculation was already driving real estate as early as 1875. The editorial states that there are some landowners who try to disparage their property when being evaluated by city bureaucrats so as to decrease the tax amount since they use that property as a residence while others attempt to drive up the value since they plan to sell the land. As the author suggests, since the land certificates reflected the ‘market value’ (yobika) and not the real value (jikka) the tax rate would always be inflated. Despite these legitimate claims presented in the editorial, the government forged ahead with the tax increase to 3% and the residents of Tokyo were forced to comply.

3.6 Making Landowners into Capitalists

As Karl Marx (1818-1883) illustrated, the monopoly of private property in land was both a hindrance to capitalist expansion as well as the condition for its perpetuation. However, as we shall see, the historical development of capitalism in Japan did not unfold in the same pattern as

Great Britain where Marx first observed these practices take form. In Great Britain the monopoly of land was considered a hindrance to capital because historically the landowning class acted against the interests of capitalists since they simply collected rent and sat on their wealth or squandered it aimlessly instead of investing it back into circulation and aiding the expansion of capital. The British classical economist, David Ricardo (1772-1823) infamously attacked the landowning class on this very issue through his theorizing of rent. According to Ricardo, rent was a transfer payment from the capitalists to the landowners that essentially created a balance of power between the two classes. He saw this as an unfair advantage that hindered economic

143 growth and, in response, he theorized a law of rent. Ricardo suggested that rent could be determined by evaluating which land had the most productive use given equal inputs of labour and capital. The worst land would yield no rent since it determines the average market price while the more fertile lands would produce rent for the landowners since it would be in demand by capitalist farmers. The landowner would then collect a rent in relation to the excess profits produced. If for rural regions rent was collected on the land that was most fertile then for urban property rent was generally based on the value of its location. His theorization of differential rent historically was connected to his theorization on international free trade as he attacked the collection of rent domestically by fighting to repeal the Corn Laws of 1815. The Corn Laws protected domestically produced grain from cheaper international imports and was seen as a major victory for the landowning class. Ricardo argued that importing cheaper grains would not only lower the cost and frequency of rent but it would also help to lower wages since it would lower the cost of living.237 To this end, he fought the landowning class by attempting to diminish their rent in order to increase capitalist investments in land which would raise overall economic productivity.

At the beginning of the Meiji period in the city of Tokyo, landownership was dominated by the daimyo and shogunate retainers. In a land survey from 1870, it was calculated that the samurai estates made up 68.6% of all the land within the city limits. Thus, it makes sense that the former daimyo were also some of the largest landholders in Tokyo. If we look at the top forty- nine landholders at the beginning of Meiji, twenty-four of them were former daimyo whereas

237 Eventually the Corn Laws would be repealed in 1846 and 1849 (long after Ricardo’s death in 1823) but the price of corn failed to fall and rents did not diminish as he had speculated. However, the free trade legislation did begin a golden age for manufacturing in England which helped its economy retain dominance over the rising capitalist economies of Germany and the United States.

144 merchants only held four spots on the list. These twenty-four landowners accounted for roughly

6% of the surveyed land while the top forty-nine held 12%. However, that number would increase to 16% by the end of the Meiji period as the top forty-nine staked their claim on over

2.1 million tsubo (over 1715 acres) of the city.238

The landowning class represented by the daimyo and the Tokugawa family continued to expand their land holdings throughout the Meiji period but they did so through the use of financial capital in the form of joint-stock banking. Whereas, with the development of capitalism in England, the landowning class stood in opposition to the capitalists and, as Ricardo observed, weakened economic growth by siphoning off surplus value from both the capitalists and the peasantry, in Japan, the landowning class became the financers of the industrial revolution. This is an important distinction to make since it not only shows how the development of capitalism in

Japan was dependent on the evolution of capitalism across the globe by absorbing the surplus value from English, American, German and French workers through government loans, but that the landowning class did not necessarily have to form a barrier to the development of capitalism domestically. Finance capital played a major role in the transformation of landowners to full outright capitalist investors and this was assisted by the creation of land markets which acted as a tool for the circulation of capital. The role that finance capital played in the shaping of the urban space of Tokyo took two different forms: fixed capital and what Marx called the consumption fund. Both forms take on the role of facilitating the circulation of capital, however, as I will mostly be dealing with residential housing in this chapter, I will focus on the consumption fund.

238 The population of Tokyo at this time would have been close to two million. This number is for all landowners including the city which managed 60,604 tsubo.

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The consumption fund is a concept in Marx’s thought that plays a similar role to that of fixed capital but it was not as thoroughly developed mainly because Marx was more concerned in understanding how the production process functioned in capitalism. Consumption fund refers to commodities that serve as instruments of consumption meaning that they are not fully consumed but instead act as a commodity for the user until the final sale after which the commodity returns to its money form (just like any other commodity that is purchased as an investment for future sale). For the purposes of this chapter, I will discuss the consumption fund in terms of commodities that need large amounts of capital to purchase such as houses and other types of land development. In this situation, a system of credit is necessary so that people are not removing large amounts of capital from circulation in order to save to buy commodities like houses. As Marx notes throughout his work Capital, capitalism as a system is a process of circulation and thus hoarding money disrupts the circulation of capital which slows down both consumption and production. In order to facilitate the circulation of capital for large purchases, credit intervenes and allows the exchange to take place by deferring the payment to a future moment. More specifically, the consumption fund in terms of housing allows for the circulation of capital through mortgages which allows the land to absorb idle capital by staking a claim on future revenues. For the land developer this creates an opportunity to accumulate capital and thus it gives incentive to organize and develop the built environment in tune with the circulation of capital.

Rent, which will be discussed in further detail below, is historically the way the landowning class accumulates wealth and maintains their monopoly on land. In Tokyo, this was also true as the largest landowners hired administrators and property managers to look after the collection of rent and maintenance of the grounds. But as the economic historian Shibata Tokue argues, the former daimyo were not simply trying to squeeze every yen out of the land through

146 rent but also invested capital onto the land. He gives the example of how daimyo often partitioned sections of their land in order to build parks, public bath houses, stores, and schools.239 While these examples are used to commend the actions of the landowning class, more generally the land was simply redeveloped for the collection of rent such as the old estate belonging to the Tokugawa House (in what is now Nabeshima Shōtō Park), which was turned into a luxury residence. Even in these situations, if we assume that the capital was already at hand and there was no need to use credit institutions, the money invested into the land acted to augment its value thus making it a part of the consumption fund. Naturally bath houses, residences and stores yielded revenues for the landowners, which had an immediate effect on the ground rent that could be appropriated. This meant that the property value would increase giving the landowner a substantial return of their money when the property was sold. The capital invested into the built environment through parks and institutional buildings like schools produce the same effect only it is their location and use value that can increase the ground rent. Since parks and schools are in demand by residents, they can help create monopoly rents in the area thus appropriating higher ground rents. Thus we can see why landowners have incentives to open up the land to inputs of capital and how capital acts to coordinate the spatial arrangements of the city.

While some landowners invested their wealth into the land by way of the consumption fund, the majority of the wealth from the landowning class was invested into joint-stock companies and public bonds. When the system of paying stipends to the court nobles, daimyo and samurai was finally commuted into twenty-year bonds in 1876, it not only saved the

239 Shibata Tokue, “Edo kara Tokyo e,” Journal of Tokyo Keizai University, Vol. 251 (October, 2006), 111-123.

147 government 50% on annual payments but it also created a large pool of capital that would be put to productive use over the next few decades. The National Bank Act of 1872 opened up the channels that would provide a wave of liquidity for both public projects as well as private enterprises. Each bank was permitted to issue paper notes and over the next two years four national banks were opened. With further amendments in 1876 which allowed for a reduction of the reserve funds from 40% to 20%, banking became a much more profitable enterprise. When the 153rd National Bank, the final national bank, was chartered in 1879, there was ¥34.4 million worth of bank notes which was a twenty-fold increase since 1876.240 This credit was necessary for financing Japan’s infrastructure projects such as the building of the railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, ports, roads, flood control, and fisheries which all were components of the fixed capital invested onto Japan’s landscape.241 From 1877-1912, spending on infrastructure remained around 2.7% of the GDP for which the building of railroads received 40-50% of these investments.242 Key to the development and success of these banks was that they were formed as joint-stock companies allowing for an easy avenue to make sitting capital productive.

240 Although there were 153 charters for banks only 148 were actually formed. 241 Paul Mayet, using statistics from 1876-1882, notes that the amount of infrastructure spending increased by 236% over the seven years. He argues that using bonds to fund these projects would have taken the financial burden off of the provincial towns and villages that financially backed them in the early years of Meiji. These bonds would have also brought more capital to the countryside of Japan thus alleviating some of the uneven development that became more obvious by the end of the Meiji period. Paul Mayet, Agricultural Insurance in Organic Connection with Savings-Banks, Land-Credit, and the Commutation of Debts, trans. by Rev. Arthur Lloyd (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co, 1893), 183-185. 242 Sakakibara Eisuke, Structural Reform in Japan: Breaking the Iron Triangle (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 25.

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Table 4: Distribution of Public Bonds to the Daimyo, Court Nobility (kuge) and Samurai after 1876243

Amount in ¥ Category of bond Number of Payment on Recipients bonds Over 1000 5% interest at 5-7.5 years 519 31,413,000 100—950 6% interest at 7.75-11 years 15,377 25,039,000 10—75 7% interest at 11.5-14 years 262,317 108,838,000 10 % 35,304 9,347,000 Total 313,517 174,637,000

The breakdown of the payout of public bonds (Table 4) stresses how much of a financial burden the nobility and ex-samurai were on the Meiji State. However, the payout in bonds not only released some financial pressure on the state but it, in turn, created a pool of capital that could be put to productive use. The nobility (kazoku), who consisted of those connected to the imperial court (kuge) as well as the daimyo, received commutations at a much higher rate than samurai of lower rank and thus were able to use their bonds as collateral for making financial investments. Following the National Bank Act, which effectively converted public bonds into bank stocks, the members of the kazoku invested heavily into the finance industry. In particular, the 15th National Bank was a direct product of the public bonds that were paid out to the nobility and the ex-warrior class (see Tables 5 and 6 below). The 15th National Bank opened for business in May of 1877 with a capital reserve of ¥17,826,000. Immediately the bank helped in financing the government’s efforts in the Seinan War and became one of the most aggressive banks for investing in industry. By observing the charts below, we can see the direct correlation between

243 Statistics are from from Gotō Yasushi, “Nihon Shihonoshugi Keiseiki no Kazoku no Zaisanshoyū Jyōkyō,” Ritsumeikan Keizaigaku, Vol. 34, No. 6, (February, 1986), 706. And from Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 95. Prior to 1876 over ¥35 million of stipend bonds (chitsuroku kōsai) were paid out to those samurai who voluntarily commuted their stipends in 1873.

149 the commutation of the stipends and the investments made to the 15th National Bank on behalf of the kazoku. While this bank was well-known because of its financial backers, it was common place for the recipients of public bonds to be shareholders of the national banks. In fact by 1880 the percent of shares held in the national banks by the kazoku and ex-samurai was 44% and 32%, respectively.244

Table 5: Amount of Public Bonds Individually Received by Nobility (kazoku) in 1876245

Yen ˃1,000,00 ˃500,000 ˃300,000 ˃100,000 ˃50,000 ˃10,000 ˃5,00 Total 0 0 Kuge 4 110 22 136 Daimyo 3 8 8 46 55 152 6 278

Table 6: Amount of Investments to the 15th National Bank by Individual Investors246

Yen ˃500,000 ˃300,000 ˃100,000 ˃50,000 ˃10,000 ˃5,000 ˃1,000 Kuge 1 17 88 25 Daimyo 3 7 26 43 157 83 23 Total 3 7 27 43 174 171 48

The close relation of landowners, the banking industry and the government created a new class of social elites who were more than just landowners or financiers or bureaucrats. Together they constituted the rise of the capitalist class. As the Canadian historian of Japan, E. H. Norman, observed in the 1940s,

244 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 100. 245 Gotō, “Nihon Shihonoshugi Keiseiki no Kazoku no Zaisanshoyū Jyōkyō,” 706. 246 Ibid., 707.

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…the commutation of the daimyo pensions, while symbolizing the political compromise between a former governing class and the new government resting largely upon merchant and landed interests for its support, represents at the same time a far-reaching social process in which the interests of the usurer, landlord, merchant, financier and ci-devant daimyo were melted down, transfused and solidified into a homogeneous mass in which the original elements become indistinguishable.247

In other words, the class antagonism that emerged in England between the landowning class and the capitalist class did not emerge in Japan simply because the landowning class was already aware of the power of capital and thus were less hostile to exchanging their entitlements for financial benefits. This awareness grew out of the Tokugawa period when the daimyos much like the central government had to borrow money from the merchants (chōnin) in order to cover their expenses during times of economic crisis. Thus the commodity form had already begun to transform Japanese society long before the Meiji government asserted its control in 1868.

Without the class antagonism between the landed aristocracy and the capitalist merchants, capitalism in Japan expanded and grew at a rapid pace throughout the Meiji period.

The role of the government in merging the interests of these two groups as well as essentially financing their wealth cannot be forgotten. Not only did the Meiji government strive to transform the kazoku into merchants by making them de facto usurers but it also guaranteed the debts between these two classes. The old debts that the daimyo incurred with merchants between the years 1844-1867 (almost ¥11 million) as well as the new debts from 1868-1871

(roughly ¥12.5 million) were honoured by the government through the issuing of bonds to the merchants.248 The distribution of public bonds in lieu of the rice stipends did not necessarily

247 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 97. 248 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 98.

151 make the kazoku any richer at face value but the subsequent investment of these bonds into the finance industry is what allowed the landed aristocracy to survive the shift to an economy dominated by commodity exchange. For the accumulation of capital, money needs to be invested back into circulation in order to complete the movement from M-M’, that is, to turn money into more money. So, although it appears as if the daimyo have just maintained their social status into the Meiji period, in reality, they have exchanged one form of circulation (Commodity-Money-

Commodity) for another (Money-Money’). It is also important to remember that the payment of the public bonds was a form of fictitious capital that staked a claim on the future collection of taxes. While on the books this simply appears as a relation between financial assets (revenue) and the interest due on bonds as a liability, in reality the issuing of public bonds was dependent on one factor alone: the collection of the land tax which mostly derived from rural peasants. This meant that public bonds acted as a tax on the peasant class. As many scholars have already noted, Japanese capitalism was built on the backs of the farmers and peasants that worked the fields whereas the kazoku and merchants simply received their wealth from the state.

3.7 Yasukuni Shrine and Finance Capital

If we turn our attention back to Yasukuni Shrine, it is interesting to see that, during the

Meiji period, it was managed and operated under the same logic as the landowning class. As for investing capital onto the land, the shrine was constantly adding new structures and undertaking landscaping projects which had the effect of raising property value by being able to appropriate a higher ground rent. In January of 1879, a war exhibition hall (buki chinretsu) was built on the shrine grounds using money that was donated by the Peers Club (Kazoku Kaikan) which was

152 established in 1874. This became common practice as the Peers Club regularly donated money to the shrine as well as other gifts such as the stone lanterns that mark the walkway leading up to the shrine. Other capital investments were geared towards the thousands of visitors that Yasukuni

Shrine hosted every year. In November of 1877, in preparation for the Special Festival commemorating those who died in the Seinan War, a garden with a square gazebo (azumaya) and a stone monument were constructed at a cost of ¥20,000.249 Three years later, in July, a tea house was built on the grounds and operated until 1906. Other cosmetic features such as a pond and waterfall were also added to the shrine grounds in the early 1870s. One of the earliest capital investments into the shrine was the construction of the Yūshūkan in 1882.250 In order to save money for such outlays of capital, the shrine had set up a fund in which it deposited ¥1000 from its annual stipend, money from selling various unused goods, as well as the interest collected off of its public bonds. The museum proved to be a popular addition and acted as a source of income for the shrine after 1890 when it came under the management of the Yasukuni Shrine Office, which was also built using the savings fund. The largest investment of capital onto the shrine grounds was the building of the Hall of Worship (Haiden) in 1901. It was financed by selling off public bonds, donations (including the money from the Sumo Association), as well as taking on a loan of 52,000 yen.251

As was mentioned above, the shrine also purchased public debt bonds thus participating in underwriting government debt. Over a sixteen-year period between 1879 and 1895, the shrine

249 Yomiuri Shinbun, morning edition page 2. November 16, 1877. 250 It was built at a cost of ¥64,900. Yasukuni Jinja Hyakunenshi , 107-09. 251 The principle and interest (ganri) for the loan was due in 1922 (interestingly the document states Meiji 55) but after a 10 year period of grace the loan was paid off using money from the national treasury.

153 purchased ¥60,000 of public debt bonds from the government.252 While this is by no means a large percentage of total bonds sold, it is an interesting use of shrine funds given Yasukuni’s ties to the government. Since the shrine was officially financed and operated by the government, the purchasing of public debt bonds is similar to when a central bank buys government debt, which is usually when the bonds are not being bought by the private sector or foreign countries. It also means that the yields that the shrine received from the bonds would have been paid for by the collection of taxes, the main source of government revenues. The time period in which Yasukuni

Shrine purchased public debt bonds is also interesting due to its correlation with Japan’s monetary policies in relation to foreign bond markets. While economic historians and those in development studies laud Japan for its industrialization through internal reforms with little reliance on foreign loans, the truth of the matter is that it was very difficult for Japan to issue foreign bonds because of their dependence on silver for currency and trade. Even though Japan had adopted the gold standard in 1871, silver was still the coin of choice due to its lower cost which put Japan at odds with other major world economies that had made a complete switch to the gold standard. The discrepancy between the two metals can be observed in the yield rates of

Japanese government bonds from 1870 when they were at 9% and in 1897, when they fell to 5% after Japan fully adopted the gold standard. Thus, Yasukuni Shrine helped finance the Japanese

Government when it was having difficulties raising funds abroad. Since the last public debt bonds were purchased in 1895, it can also be assumed that some of these funds went to the war effort against the Chinese during the Sino-Japanese War. From its participation in the public bond market we can see that Yasukuni Shrine was not just simply in the business of

252 Yasukuni Jinja Hyakunenshi, 106.

154 commemorating the war dead but that it also helped finance the conditions that created the opportunity for soldiers to fight in the war as well as profiting off of their labour in the fields.

Yasukuni Shrine not only divested its financial interests into bonds but it also was involved in the buying and selling of land. In February of 1877, part of the property from

Iidamachi District 2 was loaned to the city for the use of a military assembly hall. While at first there may have been some fees paid for the use of this land in 1889, the shrine agreed to loan it to the city for free up to a period of fifty years. However, before this contract finished, the land was eventually handed over to the state in 1923 and later was used by the Finance Ministry. It also loaned a small section of land to Tokyo Railway in 1906. The shrine was involved in acquiring land in June of 1878 when it purchased almost 5700 tsubo in Iidamachi District 1.253 A portion of this land (1110 tsubo) was sectioned off and turned into government land. In 1880, the southern one-third of this was temporarily loaned out for a fee. This land was later used as a

Statistics School in 1883, the Japan Athletics Association in 1899 and finally it was used by the

Patriotic Women’s Association (Aikoku Fujinkai) from 1904. This purchase was a good investment as this particular district had the second highest land value per tsubo average in

Fujimicho and Iidamachi. In 1881 and in 1888, the shrine also received land from neighbouring government properties expanding to the south and east.254 By the end of the Meiji period in

1912, Yasukuni Shrine increased their land holdings to 33, 372 tsubo (just over 27 acres) making

253 4710 tsubo was privately owned and purchased for ¥37,015.18 (¥14,130.22 for the procurement of the land, ¥20,402.56 for the cost of the buildings and trees, rocks, etc., as well as ¥2,482.39 for the relocation of buildings), YHS, 70.

254 In March of 1881, 124 tsubo was taken from Iidamachi District 1 (southeastern part of Kudan Hill) and in February 1888, 300 tsubo from Fujimicho District 1 (lot 39) was taken from the old Military Police Headquarters. Three years later, it was returned to the Ministry of the Army (rikugunsho).

155 it the twenty-third largest land holder in the city meaning it held more land than corporations such as Tokyo Gas and the Tokyo Railway.

After observing how Yasukuni Shrine was involved in investing capital into the shrine grounds, financing public debt and making land transactions, it is easy to see how the shrine helped give shape to the built environment of Tokyo. The imagined space of the shrine as a beacon on top of Kudan Hill as was discussed in the first two chapters is now supplemented by its role in actually forming the physical space around it. With the amount of capital that was invested onto the shrine grounds as well as the ground-rent that the shrine yielded through the collection of rents and fees, it would have raised the property values of the area by increasing the rent yields. Indeed, as I will discuss later in this chapter, the neighbourhoods around Yasukuni

Shrine saw tremendous appreciation in land value throughout the Meiji period. This would have started a chain-reaction as rising land prices would have signalled developers and landowners to invest idle capital into the area which in turn would have driven up ground-rent yields even higher because of the speculation on future revenues. The renting, purchasing and selling of land by the shrine also meant that it was tied to Tokyo’s land market and that the shrine office stood to gain from its assets climbing in value. This is particularly true since it did not have to pay property taxes as the land was government owned meaning that there was no immediate downside to an increase in the property value.

Finally, the fact that Yasukuni was involved in buying public debt puts it into a direct relation with labour. As the epigraph at the beginning of the chapter states, government bonds take the form of fictitious capital since they are “merely debt claims” which is another form of investing in appropriation as opposed to production. To this Marx adds, “[it is] nothing more than the growth of a class of state creditors with a preferential claim to certain sums from the

156 overall proceeds of taxation. In the way that even an accumulation of debts can appear as an accumulation of capital, we see the distortion involved in the credit system reach its culmination.”255 In this instance, the debt claim is paid for by the collection of taxes which is taken from the production of new wealth by labourers. Thus we are introduced to what Marx refers to as the secondary forms of exploitation through interest-bearing capital where the

“interest payment is linked to future labour as a counter-value.”256 Given this analysis, it becomes evident that the management of Yasukuni Shrine also had bearings on setting labour in motion so that it could accumulate capital by staking its claim on future labour.

3.8 Urban Planning and Fictitious Capital

Having shown that the landowning class were able to transform themselves into successful capitalists through investments in fixed capital and bond financing, it should be no surprise that the kazoku continued to rank among the top twenty-five land holders at the end of the Meiji period. In fact, over half of the names on the list were either former daimyo or their direct descendants. The others were generally businessmen who were connected to large corporations (zaibatsu) like Mitsui or Mitsubishi or they were involved in the finance industry as bankers. To find Yasukuni Shrine on this list just shows how big the shrine grounds were in comparison to other landholding entities in Tokyo at the time. Land was an important asset for the shrine and it would have received a substantial return on rent as well as by selling off small

255 Marx, Capital Vol. 3, 607-608. 256 Harvey, The Limits of Capital, 265.

157 lots. By 1912, the value of the land alone would have been worth over ¥300,000257 and given the residential land prices in Kudan today, this area of land would be worth almost ¥242.3 billion.258

Figure 3: Land Value and Size of Yasukuni Shrine as calculated in 1878

Within the top eighty landholders we can also find Meiji elder statesmen (genkun) like

Ōkubo and Kido who had used their power and wealth to make small fortunes in Tokyo. While there were very few members of the imperial family who made the top one-hundred, the

Arisugawa family was ranked seventy-second with just two properties totaling 16,743 tsubo.

Besides being able to observe who invested their wealth into land, the chart below (Table 7) also

257 The shrine land was not assessed in the 1912 survey so this number is a conservative estimate calculated by averaging the percentage of land value growth from the districts around the shrine. A higher estimate would be just over ¥400,000. 258 This number was calculated using 2014 residential land prices from the Tokyo Metropolitan Bureau of Finance using properties near Yasukuni Shrine. This was then multiplied by the 1912 amount of land holdings although this number has since decreased.

158 shows how land became even more concentrated in the hands of the wealthy when compared to the beginning of the Meiji period. By the end of Meiji, the top ten landholders collectively

Table 7: Largest landholding entities at the end of the Meiji Period

(includes arable and other miscellaneous land types)

Rank Name Area Number of (tsubo) Properties 1 Maeda Toshinori* 154,233.16 470 2 Iwasaki Hisaya 139,109.67 166 3 Mitsubishi Limited Partner Co. 132,431.59 67 4 Minejima Kou 103,552.42 182 5 Mitsui Ginkō 97,627.06 143 6 Abe Masatake* 65,865.56 25 7 Tokyo City 60,604.01 368 8 Horikoshi Kakujirō 60,229.87 124 9 Watanabe Jiemon 54,723.83 52 10 Tokugawa Yorimichi* 51,985.03 67 11 Hosokawa Morinari* 50,846.81 68 12 Asano Nagakoto* 50,301.56 28 13 Sakai Tadamichi* 48,452.95 25 14 Doi Toshitomo* 48,335.23 22 15 Abe Masakoto* 46,905.60 28 16 Yasuda Ginkō 39,838.11 59 17 Mitsui General Partner Co. 37,545.39 62 18 Mōri Motoakira* 36,369.11 47 19 Sakai Tadaoki* 36,155.70 17 20 Tokugawa Iesato* 35,792.66 8 21 Minomura Kuraji 33,656.03 40 22 Date Munenobu* 33,468.17 27 23 Yasukuni Shrine 33,372.56 1 24 Fukuzawa Sanpachi 33,284.24 78 25 Nabeshima Naohiro* 32,508.08 16

Chart reproduced from Tokyo Chiseki Zu259 (* represents former daimyo)

259 Ibid., 21.

159 owned 7% of the city while the top twenty-five controlled 12%.260 Given that the population of

Tokyo had grown to roughly two million by 1912, these numbers reveal that the landed aristocracy of the Edo period had successfully transformed themselves into the financial capitalists of the Meiji period and the result was their continued monopolization of the land in

Tokyo.

With the continued monopolization of land under the landowning-capitalist class alongside of the land reforms which removed all restrictions to the buying and selling of land, the land value of residential lots in Tokyo saw tremendous growth throughout the Meiji period.

While most of this can be attributed to speculation as land was traded on the market just like any other commodity and thus was susceptible to those who used the buying and selling of land to produce a profit, it was also connected to the urban planning reforms of the Meiji government.

These reforms were generally aimed at facilitating the circulation of capital by improving the city’s infrastructure for transporting commodities as well as the consumers who would purchase them. While the city of Edo relied heavily on waterways for transporting commercial goods, during the Meiji period, more emphasis was put on improving ground transportation routes. This meant putting lots of capital into infrastructure like roads and railways. Although these early urban planning policies certainly improved the mobility of commodities and modified the urban space of the city, one of the biggest influences on how land was developed and used during the

Meiji period was a product of the government’s failure to implement particular urban policies regarding building codes.

260 These numbers are produced from Nomura Etsuko, “Chiseki Daichō no Bunseki ni yoru Kindai Tokyo no Tochi Shoyū no Hensen,” in Tokyo Chiseki Zu (Tokyo: Fuji Shuppan, 2012), 20-22.

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As André Sorensen notes, the first major urban planning policies in Japan were developed by a highly centralized state apparatus that was driven to turn the city of Tokyo into a respectable modern capital.261 Thus emphasis was placed on an aesthetic facelift that was meant to reproduce the appearance of major urban cities in Europe and the United States. The first chance to implement these architectural ideals presented itself after a major fire in the Ginza district in 1872, which effectively cleared an area of roughly 234 acres in the merchant district of

Tokyo. Meiji bureaucrats quickly implemented a plan to rebuild the area using some simple urban planning methods such as widening the streets and paving them as well as improving the fire resistance of neighbourhoods by instituting firebreaks.262 Over the next five years, the government financed the Ginza Brick Town (Ginza Renga Gai) project, which included brick roads, paved sidewalks and brick buildings along the main roadways. While the Ginza area was supposed to be the pride of Tokyo, it was not particularly well received by the locals and the project was eventually shut down only a third of the way due to skyrocketing financial costs of which the Meiji state simply could not afford. Regardless of the successfulness of the project, as the Japanese architectural historian Fujimori Terunobu has shown, this input of capital onto the land had a positive correlation on the property value making Ginza the highest valued yen per tsubo area in Tokyo throughout the Meiji period.263

261 André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Routledge, 2002), 61. 262 Carola Hein notes that these changes were made possible by land readjustments which reduced the lot sizes and were seemingly carried out uniformly meaning that small lots were reduced the same amount as larger ones. Carola Hein, “Shaping Tokyo: Land Development and Planning Practice in the Early Modern Japanese Metropolis,” Journal of Urban History Vol. 36, No. 4. (July, 2010), 463. 263 Fujimori Terunobu, Meiji no Tokyo Keikaku (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1990), 44-45. The high land value in Ginza continues to this day as Ginza has claimed the most valuable piece of land in Japan for thirty years straight. See Sorensen for the historiographical debate on whether the Ginza Brick Town was successful or not, The Making of Urban Japan, 62-63.

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Seeing that the cash-strapped government stood to gain from higher land values through the collection of land taxes, it should come as no surprise that they continued to explore plans to develop Tokyo’s urban space through the investment of large amounts of capital. Throughout the

1880s, various foreign architects including Josiah Condor, Wilhelm Böckmann, and Herman

Ende were commissioned to draft plans for redesigning Tokyo’s downtown area. With broad avenues, grand public buildings and open public spaces, the blueprints presented to the government in the late 1880s required vast amounts of capital and labour. Even more modest plans by local bureaucrats like Tokyo’s mayor, Matsuda Michiyuki, which called for a redevelopment of the downtown core using high-density, multi-storey stone buildings, was deemed to be too expensive of an undertaking. Much like the experience with urban planning initiatives in the 1870s, the government quickly realized that none of these projects would be feasible so the government turned their attention to more attainable goals. The Tokyo City

Improvement Ordinance (Tokyo Shiku Kaisei Jōrei) in 1888 was the first product of twenty years of trying to implement urban planning reforms.264 It focussed on improving commerce, public health, fire prevention and transportation across the city as opposed to just the central core. In order to help fund these meager reforms a tax on alcohol was introduced the same year but there still remained a funding gap which greatly reduced the extent to which the Tokyo City

Improvement Ordinance (TCIO) could be carried out. Although the ordinance greatly improved

Tokyo’s major avenues as well as expanding railway connections, adding park spaces and creating public cemeteries, its biggest impact on the urban space of Tokyo was perhaps what it was unable to legislate: a building code. As Sorensen writes,

264 For more on the Tokyo City Improvement Ordinance see Fujimori (Chapter 3) and Sorensen (Chapter 2).

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while originally a bill outlining a building code had accompanied the draft TCIO, it was dropped when the rest of the ordinance was forced into law over the objections of the Privy Council. The failure to enact a building code was tremendously important because without it the TCIO became in effect primarily an infrastructure plan of road-widening and waterworks construction, and contained no measures to regulate private building activity. Thus, although the TCIO designated an overall frame-work for urban development, it could not require conformance to its provisions by private actors.265

A building code was considered necessary for the improvement of public health and was something championed by two major public figures, Nagayo Sensai and Mori Ōgai, who had spent time in Germany studying hygiene. The main concern was that the quickly mass-produced wooden tenements which became home to Tokyo’s slums presented dangers for the spread of diseases and fires. While a strict code that regulated how and what materials residential buildings should be constructed was deemed necessary by many government bureaucrats, landowners rallied against it. As Sorensen suggests, this is not surprising seeing that the right to vote in the first national election of 1890 was partially based on the amount of land tax paid to the state.

This meant that those who had a political voice were also the largest landowners and richest businessmen of Japan who obviously would object to such a costly piece of legislation. The

Japanese architectural historian, Hori Takeyoshi, notes that, in neighbouring Yokohama, similar attempts to enact building codes requiring stone and brick structures was also strongly resisted by local residents and thus was discarded.266

While the lack of a building code may have created more difficulties for the state in dealing with public safety, it helped form ideal conditions for landowners and the proliferation of

265 Sorensen, 69. 266 Hori Takeyoshi, “Early City Planning,” in Yokohama Past and Present, edited by Katō Yūzō (Yokohama: Yokohama City University, 1990), 99.

163 rental properties in Tokyo during the Meiji period. Traditionally, Japanese houses in the capital were constructed of wood which was both cheap and more abundant when compared to brick or stone. If the city was successful in implementing a building code, it would have slowed down the construction of new residential structures because of the cost of using stone or brick materials as well as the more intensive labour required. Although the amount of capital put into building more permanent structures with stone and bricks would have had a positive influence on land value over a longer period as evidenced with the Ginza Brick Town, the ability to cheaply and quickly build residential tenements with wood meant that landowners did not have to invest as much capital onto the land giving them more freedom to expand their landholdings or to divest their money into other industries. It also meant that it was easier to subdivide lots since wooden structures could be quickly torn down and rebuilt. Thus, by failing to enact building codes, the government helped give birth to a thriving housing and land rental industry. With the land reforms having already secured a monopoly of land against the landless peasantry as well as continuously pushing landowners who could barely afford to keep their land due to economic factors out, the monopolization of land became further concentrated within a smaller population leading to a rise in land values across the city.267 These rising land values collided with a housing market that required low investments of capital creating ideal conditions for a rental market that could demand high yields on ground-rent.

Despite the advantages that this posed for land developers, turning land into a commodity created a market that rapidly became inaccessible to many of Tokyo’s residents. By the late

1880s, land prices in the city of Tokyo were beginning to boom and in the next decade areas

267 For more on how land was used as rental properties see, Suzuki Hiroyuki, Mieru Toshi/Mienai Toshi: Machizukuri, Kenchiku, Monyumento (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1996) and Hatate Isao, Mitsubishi Zaibatsu no Fudōsan Keiei (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyōronsha, 2005).

164 such as Ginza saw prices increase by a multiple of six (from ¥50/tsubo to ¥300/tsubo). This increase in land value was closely connected to the monopolization of land in the city, which was bolstered by an increase of demand throughout the 1880s. In the year 1886 alone, a rapid influx of new residents saw over 42,000 new dwellings built and a population increase of over 212,000 people. Over the next two decades, Tokyo’s population would increase by almost a million residents nearly doubling its size, which resulted in quick returns for the land developers who could barely keep up with the demand for new housing. Many of these new residents came in search of work from rural areas of Japan and given their financial situation were unable to purchase land within the city. As Marx argued, the monopoly on private property is an important aspect of capitalist development and its perpetuation because of the ongoing process of primitive accumulation. Primitive accumulation, which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter, is the removal or expropriation of people from the land, which, in effect, divorces them from their means of production. Without being able to live off the land freely, this population must now transform themselves into wage labourers by seeking some form of employment in order to subsist. In turn, they must also find a place to live and this forms a social relation between labour and landowners. Being unable to afford Tokyo’s land prices, it meant that most of the wage labourers had to navigate the cities growing rental industry.

The geographer David Harvey claims that urban rent is difficult to theorise, despite its central role in producing the spatial structure of capitalist development. It is difficult because rent is not always a good indicator of class differences since landlords can vary from the extreme rich to landless renters who sublet or from multinational corporations to small landholders. This means that rather than focussing on the various actors involved we need to turn our attention to the role of rent in the structure of a capitalist economy. At the surface, rent appears to be simply a payment for the use of a space for a determined amount of time but what is concealed within

165 this exchange are a number of social relations. To account for this sociohistorical development,

Harvey examines the role of rent through both the circulation of capital as well as the circulation of revenues in order to differentiate how rent works in urban environments.

Within the circulation of capital, rent can be determined by the social appraisal of its worth due to natural factors like the fertility of the land or because of its location (such as its proximity to a market). However, both of these factors can be manipulated by the introduction of capital which can increase fertility or overcome advantages of location with technology.268 The result is that the relation between these two factors (land and capital) can cancel the other out meaning that the “appropriation of rent internalizes contradictory functions.”269 This contradiction which is reflected in class relations between landowners and capitalists not only affects the accumulation of capital but it also treats the land as a pure financial asset in need of investments. Harvey sums up the historical importance of making land a financial asset in regards to spatial organization by stating:

Not only is the appropriation of rent socially necessary under capitalism by virtue of the key coordinating function it performs, but landowners must also treat the land as a pure financial asset, a form of fictitious capital, and seek, thereby, an active role in coordinating the flow of capital onto and through the land. The effect is to free up the land to the circulation of interest-bearing capital and to tie land markets, land uses, and spatial organization in the general circulation process of capital.270

The land reforms of 1873 had this same effect on land as the space of Tokyo quickly became tied to land markets and the financial structures that facilitated the circulation of finance capital. For

268 This is essentially Marx’s argument against Ricardo’s two types of differential rent which although “the first is the basis for the second, at the same time [they] place limits on one another.” Marx, Capital Vol. 3, 871. 269 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 95. 270 Ibid., 97.

166 many residents of the city the relation of interest-bearing capital to the land was mediated by mortgages. As early as 1881, Tokyo had the highest rate of mortgages per cho (2.45 acres) of land out of the three urban prefectures.271 By the final decade of the Meiji period, commercial transactions of land and buildings in Tokyo averaged over 10,000 per year and tripled in value to

¥23.35 million in 1910.272 Over the same period, mortgages increased from ¥12.56 million in

1901 to ¥22.94 million in 1910.273 What these figures show is that, by the end of the Meiji period, land had been opened up to the flow of capital thus tying it closely to the financial structures that facilitated the circulation of capital and those who stood to benefit from it. With so much money flowing through the built environment of Tokyo, land values continued to rise as speculation, shown by the increase in the value of mortgages, organized urban space. This approach shows that the built environment along with the spatial organization of Tokyo was shaped not by government policies but rather by the circulation of capital. Naturally, this organization of space based on flows of capital reflected the social relations between those who appropriated rent and those who paid it. Just as public bonds stake a claim on the future collection of taxes, mortgages stake their claim on future rent which is generated by future labour. While Harvey based these observations off of Marx’s analysis of rent, he adds to this discussion by introducing a theory of rent based on the circulation of revenues.

The circulation of revenues is Harvey’s term for understanding the space of exchange and how it relates to production. Through production, value and surplus value are generated but after

271 Paul Mayet, 65. 272 Tokyo-shi Shichōshitsu Sōmubu Tōkeika, Tokyo-shi Tōkei Nenpyō, (Tokyo: Tokyo-shi Shichōshitsu Sōmubu, 1910), 76-77. 273 Ibid., 78-79.

167 they are produced they take various forms such as wages, profits, interest on loans, taxes or rent.

These various forms of revenues are then utilized to purchase commodities or services thus completing the circulation of capital that is necessary to keep capital in motion. Discerning where these revenues go and how they are used is an impossible task but it makes sense that some portion of this is used for rent. It can also be deduced that there are some natural limits to the appropriation of rent that are related to the formation of capital. For example, as was mentioned above, the amount of capital invested onto land in which rent acts as a return on can force rent prices to rise whereas, on the other hand, wages can bring down rent since rent prices can affect the ability of the worker to reproduce their labour power. However, even these methods of control are directly tied to the monopolization of land through private property since they arise from the relation between landowners and labour. In urban areas, the monopoly on rent is particularly common due to their “privileged location relative to previous investments.”274

Once again, it becomes evident how land acts as an instrument of consumption to facilitate the circulation of capital and its effect on the organization of space in the city. As investments of capital into the land raise land values and require a larger return, this affects the amount of money demanded from the circulation of revenues for the purposes of rent. With more money being collected from rent, it, in turn, makes landownership more profitable pushing land value even higher and further out of reach of those who cannot afford it. Thus, the collective monopoly of land helps reproduce the conditions for rent. This particular point can be observed at Yasukuni

Shrine since it was one of these privileged locations in the city due to its proximity to government office as well as the amount of capital that was invested into the shrine grounds.

274 Harvey, The Urban Experience, 102.

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Figure 4: 1878 Survey of Land Value and Plot Size in Fujimicho District 2

If we look at land value and tenancy rates in the neighbourhoods around Yasukuni

Shrine, it is obvious that the circulation of capital and the circulation of revenues had an impact on the spatial organization of the area around Kudan Hill. During the Meiji period, Yasukuni

Shrine was located in Kōjimachi Ward, which was to the west of the imperial palace grounds and generally consisted of residential and government buildings. Given its proximity to these buildings as well as the number of daimyo estates that were in this area, it can be assumed that

Kōjimachi Ward was the recipient of a number of capital investments as part of the Tokyo City

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Improvement Ordinance.275 These investments, along with its location in the high part of the city, had a positive influence on the land value of the area around the shrine. Table 8 shows the appreciation of land value between 1878 and 1912 in two adjacent neighbourhoods. While the growth in land value over this period of time in this particular part of Kōjimachi is about seventy-five percent of a commercial area such as Ginza, it still represents a high rate of growth for a residential area. My argument here is that Yasukuni Shrine contributed to the increase of land values in this area due to its use as a park space as well as the amount of capital invested onto it through the addition of buildings and landscaping. Given that it attracted large crowds during festivals and other ceremonious occasions, it also would have been profitable for nearby businesses. All of these factors helped raise the value of land which in turn would have affected the amount of ground rent that could be demanded as a return on these investments. Furthermore, the table also shows a general increase in the rate of absentee landlords. In nine out of eleven districts, the tenancy rate grew dramatically meaning that more landowners opted to turn their land holdings into a source of revenue.276 The main method in which this was achieved was through land readjustments meaning that larger lots were partitioned to create small adjacent lots.277 An example of this is in Iidamachi District 3, where many of the thirty-three lots that were there in 1878, were subdivided creating eighteen new lots by 1912. The increase of lots

275 Specifically, in regards to Yasukuni Shrine, it benefited from the main roadway being widened and then later in December 1904, an electric tram line made its way to the bottom of Kudan Hill. Almost three years later in July 1907, it was extended to climb to the top of Kudan Hill. This tram was in operation until March 1970. 276 In two of the districts, the reason why tenancy contracted was because a significant portion of the lots were purchased by the government (Fujimicho District 4) or Yasukuni Shrine (Iidamachi District 1). 277 Carola Hein argues that this pattern of land readjustments became the dominant method of urban planning by the post-Meiji state which accounts for all the small and at times strangely shaped lots in Tokyo today. Carola Hein, 456.

170 occurred in nine out of eleven districts and closely correlates to the increase in absentee landlords.

The rate of absentee landlords in these two neighbourhoods also reveals a little about the circulation of revenues and its relation to rent. The increase of tenancy rates between 1878 and

1912 shows that the rental market in Tokyo was strong which meant that landlords could probably demand a high ground rent. In fact, in 1910, Kōjimachi Ward claimed the fifth highest average monthly rate of rent per tsubo in the city at 35 sen.278 At the same time, it also claimed the title of being the least accessible ward since its lowest rent rates were the highest in the city.

This meant that those who lived in the area around Yasukuni Shrine either as landowners or renters were probably financially well off.279 These statistics prove the deficiency in thinking of urban rent only through stratified classes. While rent is often imagined as a transfer of wealth from the poorest section of the population to the landowning class, it can also be collected from capitalists and the rich just as the working class who own property can partake in the collection of rents. This is why it is important to understand the category of rent as a product of the collective monopoly on land and the claim that it places on future labour. If we assert that the

Yasukuni Shrine grounds was a product of large investments of capital and acknowledge its role in increasing land value in adjacent neighbourhoods then we can also claim that the shrine played a role in mobilizing labour as well as staking a claim on the value produced by that future labour beyond its own physical boundaries.

278 The wards that had a higher monthly rate of rent per tsubo were Nihonbashi, Shitaya (Ueno), Kyobashi and Asakusa, respectively. From Tokyo-shi Tōkei Nenpyō, 61. 279 Across the entire ward of Kōjimachi, 336 out of 658 lots were registered to kazoku and shizoku in Meiji 18 (1885). Suzuki Yoshiyuki, “Meiji Jyūnendai Tokyo no tochi shoyū,” in Kindai Nihon no Keisei to Sozei (Tokyo: Yushisha, 2008), 56.

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Table 8: Land Values and Absentee Landlord Rates in Fujimicho and Iidamachi during the Meiji period

City District 1878 Average Absent 1912 Average Absent Appreciation ¥/tsubo Landlord ¥/tsubo Landlord from 1878- 1912 Fujimicho 1.24 37% 10.7 63% 763% District 1 Fujimicho 0.44 36% 7.31 54% 1561% District 2 Fujimicho 0.68 N/A 9.0 N/A 1224% District 3 (estimated) (estimated) (Yasukuni) Fujimicho 0.24 35% 4.25 19% 1671% District 4 Fujimicho 0.26 36% 4.32 50% 1562% District 5 Fujimicho 0.22 53% 3.7 33% 1582% District 6 Iidamachi 0.88 30% 13.73 25% 1460% District 1 Iidamachi 1.51 28% 15.17 69% 905% District 2 Iidamachi 0.38 36% 6.05 59% 1492% District 3 Iidamachi 0.41 7% 7.04 38% 1617% District 4 Iidamachi 0.19 23% 3.22 73% 1594% District 5 Iidamachi 0.34 19% 5.72 62% 1582% District 6

280 Data collected from the Chika Torishirabechō and Tokyo Shi Oyobi Setsuzoku Gunbu Chiseki Daichō

The 1873 Land Reforms established a new logic to how space would be organized and utilized around the commodity form. While this radically impacted the development of urban space in Tokyo during the Meiji period, it does not mean that it completely erased older types of

280 Tokyo-to Kōbunshokan Shiryō, Chika Torishirabechō, 604.C2.13 and Tokyo Shi Oyobi Setsuzoku Gunbu Chiseki Daichō (Tokyo: Tokyo Shi-Ku Chōsa Kai, 1912).

172 land usage nor did it require the destruction of former social relations that were tied to the land.

For example, elements of the built environment from the Tokugawa era such as the samurai and daimyo estates of the high-city or the merchant and pleasure quarters of the low-city that were products of a feudal logic of spatial use and thus a different mode of production, did not disappear from the urban space of Meiji Tokyo. As the architectural historian Jinnai Hidenobu argues, the spatial organization of the city seems to persist from the feudal into the modern. This is because capital was able to penetrate these older forms of land usage not by erasing them but through their integration into a land market. So even though the grand re-imagining of Tokyo’s downtown by foreign architects in the 1880s presented a different spatial arrangement that attempted to modernize a feudal city, this was not necessary in terms of transforming land into a commodity that facilitated the circulation of capital. In the same way, the former social relations regarding the landownership of feudal Japan did not need to be overcome by capitalism since the class organization of the feudal period gave way to a merger between the interests of the landowning class and the merchants which resulted in the creation of a financier class which also facilitated the accumulation of capital through financing. Both of these factors produce the same conclusion; that the Meiji land reforms brought all aspects of the built environment, its production, its use, and the social relations that emerge from the appropriation of surplus value through rent, into the realm of the circulation of capital thus subjugating them to the capitalist mode of exchange.

The role of Yasukuni Shrine in coordinating the spatial arrangement of Tokyo is a result of how land became a pure financial asset and thus a form of fictitious capital, which was linked to the credit system that facilitated such large investments of capital. As land was turned into a commodity that could be freely bought and sold on the market, landowners as a collective class used their monopoly of this particular commodity to appropriate rent form the circulation of

173 revenues. While this acted to coordinate and organize the built environment of Tokyo, it also gave way to speculation on land as higher amounts of capital invested onto the land required a higher yield in ground-rent. So even though land prices acted as a marker to allocate capital and develop land to its best use, it was also a product of the speculation brought about by the role of fictitious capital in land markets. Since fictitious capital always stakes its claim on future labour, it also places the development of land in a direct relation to the production of surplus value.

Thus, this chapter was able to pinpoint how Yasukuni Shrine played a role in setting labour in motion through its interactions in the land market as well as its purchasing of public debt bonds.

Just as ideas and subjects constantly entered into the space of Yasukuni Shrine, which impacted its relation to the outside world, Yasukuni itself cannot be contained simply by its property boundaries on top of Kudan Hill. It bleeds out into the space around it as was demonstrated through the shrine’s influence on land values and, consequently, on land usage in neighbouring districts. Through these actions, those who managed the shrine staked their claim on future rents as well as future government revenues thus connecting the shrine to the overall production of wealth in Japan. This meant that, by the end of the Meiji period, the management of Yasukuni

Shrine had much more in common with the financial and social elite of Japan than it did to the rural, working-class soldiers that it enshrined and claimed to memorialize.

This study on land markets and rent also reveals the main contradiction of capital: that it finds its value and limit in labour power. As David Harvey observes, “the capacity to absorb idle money capital within the consumption fund is limited by the circulation of future revenues…

[because] the claim on future revenues derived from future labour can far exceed the value-

174 creating capacities of that future labour.”281 Without speculation, the organization of the built environment could not proceed along the lines of supporting the accumulation of capital and thus land would not be fully brought into the circulation of capital. And yet, through speculation in land markets, it is revealed that ground-rent does not produce value in itself but simply represents the appropriation of value and that value can only be produced by labour. With this point, this project finally arrives at the central argument of Marx’s critique of political economy: labour power, which will be the focus of the next chapter.

281 Harvey, The Limits of Capital, 231-232.

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Chapter 4 Soldiers, Surplus Populations and the Nation

The conscription is the vitality of a nation, the purification of its morality and the real foundations of all its habits.

--Napoleon Bonaparte282

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème…

--Karl Marx283

In February of 1893, a bronze statue of Ōmura Masujirō was constructed on the Yasukuni

Shrine grounds in the center of the horse racing track. The statue, funded by an imperial grant, was built to honour the man who led the imperial forces against the bakufu and later was appointed to the position of Minister of War (hyōbu dayū) during which he instituted military reforms that established Japan’s national army. Often praised as the first Western-style sculpture in Japan, it depicts a confident Ōmura standing on top of a stone pedestal dressed in traditional baggy pleated trousers (hakama) and a formal half-coat (haori). Tucked into his belt are the commonly worn short and long swords, however, in Ōmura’s left hand he holds a peculiar

282 G. De Liancourt, Political Aphorisms: Moral and Philosophical Thoughts of the Emperor Napoleon, edited by James Alexander Manning (London: T. C. Newby, 1848), 16. 283 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 63.

176 object: binoculars. Although binoculars were used during the Boshin War, they did not become standard military gear until the Sino-Japanese War and then a prominent fixture of the navy during the Russo-Japanese War.284 However, as Tsubouchi Yūzō suggests, the binoculars are not simply a tool of the field general but are also symbolic of the modern state, which surveys and watches its civilian subjects through the Foucauldian gaze.285 This point emphasizes Ōmura’s more inconspicuous role of imagining a new spatial structure for Tokyo.

With the selection of Kudan Hill as the location for Yasukuni Shrine, Ōmura was one of the first bureaucrats to have envisioned large wide boulevards around the imperial palace opening up the cluttered and narrow Edo streets. In this sense, Ōmura was also an architect of the modern city that sought to produce a different type of spatial relation between the state and its citizens. After all, the installation of wide boulevards and open public spaces in nineteenth- century urban planning, such as in Haussmann’s Paris, has long been associated with policing and the suppression of rebellious citizens.286 This point was not lost on Tsubouchi as he implied that, if the statue is situated within a discourse of state power, the binoculars suggest that Ōmura is watching over the old low-city as a reminder of the disciplinary surveillance of the Meiji state.

284 At this time, the company now known as Konica imported over 60 Carl Zeiss binoculars including the ones that Admiral Tōgō famously wore. In fact, on one of the two large bronze lanterns that stand outside the second torii at Yasukuni Shrine is a war scene of Admiral Tōgō wearing his marineglas binoculars. John Baird, “Early Binoculars,” Nikon Historical Society Journal, Vol. 31, (March 1991). 285 Tsubouchi Yūzō, Yasukuni (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1999), 54-56. 286 Maeda Ai discusses modern urban planning as having a close correlation to prison reforms in that they both produce the contradiction of being a space of liberation and confinement. He makes this connection by suggesting that Jeremy Bentham’s prison design, the Panopticon, is the logic under which the modern city is constructed. “Not only did the straight-line boulevards allow for rapid deployment of police and military troops, but they also eliminated the blind spots where insurgents could lay in ambush.” Maeda Ai, “Utopia of the Prisonhouse: A Reading of In Darkest Tokyo,” translated by Seiji M. Lippit and James A. Fujii from Text and the City: Essays on Japanese Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 40-41.

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Later in his text on Yasukuni, Tsubouchi outlines what Ōmura might have observed if he was still alive in 1893 when the statue was completed on top of Kudan Hill:

Those of the Satsuma-Chōshū group that formed the heart of the Meiji bureaucracy sought to develop Tokyo as a modern city but ironically what actualized was the problem of slums. If you think about it, it is very symbolic that the statue of Ōmura Masujirō holding binoculars in his left hand and Matsubara Iwagorō’s In Darkest Tokyo appear in the same year.287

Iwagorō’s In Darkest Tokyo (Saiankoku) explored life in the slums that had enveloped parts of

Tokyo in a matter of decades while cynically espousing the fruits of modernization. However, even though Tsubouchi proposes a Foucauldian reading of the disciplinary gaze of the state and how the urban environment was transformed to make people visible, he seems to separate this idea from the very reason why the state sought to commemorate Ōmura; that is, his role in shaping the Japanese Imperial Army through the conscription system.

This chapter will attempt to fuse these two portraits of Ōmura, one as the watchdog of the low-city and the other as the founder of the national army, together using the concept of surplus populations. Tsubouchi’s commentary on the binoculars as the disciplinary gaze of the state points to the emergence of surplus populations in the slums which, as was discussed in the previous chapter, became the dumping grounds for migrant rural populations seeking work in the city. At the same time, Ōmura as the military leader who inspired and fought for the implementation of universal conscription also deals with surplus populations as young men were plucked out of the countryside and placed into urbanized military camps across the nation.288

287 Tsubouchi, 59. 288 Although the implementation of universal conscription would be carried out by Ōmura’s successor, Yamagata Aritomo, it was Ōmura that pushed for a reorganization of the army through the use of armed peasants which he had used against the bakufu in the 1860s. In Ōmura’s opinion, the feudal warrior class system had run its course and only the creation of a conscript army could rid Japan of the privileged samurai class. On this topic, E. H. Norman

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Through these two images of Ōmura, I want to connect Yasukuni Shrine to the management and, as I will later argue, the reproduction of surplus populations.

Discussions on surplus populations usually begin with the Reverend Thomas Robert

Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which postulated that overpopulation was a result of the difference between the growth rate of populations in relation to the production of food. Since populations grow at an exponential rate (geometric), it would eventually overtake the production of food which can only increase in uniform increments (an arithmetic rate) thus resulting in an impoverished section of the population. In the Grundrisse,

Marx harshly critiques this position for being too simple as well as ahistorical stating that,

his conception is altogether false and childish because he regards overpopulation as being of the same kind in all the different historic phases of economic development; [he] does not understand their specific difference, and hence stupidly reduces these very complicated and varying relations to a single relation, two equations, in which the natural reproduction of humanity appears on the one side, and the natural reproduction of edible plants on the other…289

In this manner, Malthus ignored the historical conditions that both produces and creates limits to the relation between populations and their production of the means of subsistence.290 While

Marx methodically critiques this theory through analyzing various historical periods, he is mostly interested in debunking how Malthus understood the emergence of surplus populations at

shares the story of Ōmura’s disgust when a friend of his wore the samurai longsword to a conference. This anecdote would suggest that Ōmura would not have approved of his own statue as it portrays him wearing the samurai short and longswords. E. Herbert Norman, “Soldier and Peasant in Japan: The Origins of Conscription,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 16, No. 1, (March, 1943), 63. 289 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, translated by Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Classics, 1993), 605-606. 290 Marx agrees that, when discussing plants and animals, an abstract law of population could be tenable but that it would only be possible if we could detract the interventions of humans. Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 784.

179 that historical moment. For Marx, understanding how and why surplus populations existed boiled down to what he called “labour capacities,” in that depending on the mode of production, there was a necessary labouring population and also a surplus labouring population; both groups being able to perform labouring tasks but only one group being necessary for production. Since

Malthus was writing during a period of economic transition known as the Industrial Revolution, his observations regarding surplus populations should be read through the basic tenets of the capitalist mode of production, which had already begun to reorganize the social relations of production. Marx notes that surplus populations are both a condition for the capitalist mode of production as well as a product of capitalist accumulation.291 They are a condition because surplus populations supply necessary labour for the expansion of production and capital through the business cycle. As Marx states, it is this same cycle that also produces surplus populations:

“it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relatively redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus population.”292 This is why we need to think of this population as being relative to the composition of capital and, as Marx refers to them, as an industrial reserve army. It is this image of surplus populations as a ‘reserve army’ that inspired the main argument in this chapter that will examine the relation between the creation of literal military reserve armies and the relative surplus population that Marx discusses in Capital.

291 As Uno Kōzō has argued this is because labour power is a commodity that capital cannot produce on its own. Thus, in order to appear as a closed reproducing system, capital must continue to, through the production process, manufacture a relative surplus population. 292 Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 782.

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Historically, the formation of national conscript armies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries temporally aligned with the emergence of surplus populations that were a product of the capitalist mode of production. In Japan, these two historical processes were implemented through state policies in the same year as the Land Tax Reform and the

Conscription Edict were both promulgated in 1873. I contend that this is no coincidence and that similar to how Marx articulates surplus populations as being a condition for and a product of the capitalist mode of production this stands true for universal conscription as well.293 In fact, the production of an industrial reserve army needed to be constituted prior to the creation of a military reserve army. Understanding this historical relation between surplus populations and universal conscription is important in my discussion of Yasukuni Shrine because of the form in which these two issues were socially expressed: the idea of the nation. The late Benedict

Anderson infamously defined the nation as an “imagined political community” as a means to interrogate its origins and central concepts. However, despite the brilliance of Imagined

Communities in its tracing of the idea of the nation, the focus on nationality as a cultural artefact in some ways missed a key point in how this imagined community could historically emerge.294

293 While historically various forms of universal conscription have existed, we have to avoid the “Malthusian blindspot”, which is not that humanity will overcome apocalyptic catastrophe with innovation but rather these limits grow out of the social relations of production. So the possibility of some form of a universal conscription in the ancient Chinese dynasties will have emerged within specific historical circumstances and limitations (although interestingly, the implementation of universal conscription during the short-lived Qin Dynasty was closely connected to the centralization of state power and, along with forced labour, played a role in the collapse of the dynasty) that need to be understood as being different than modern forms of universal conscription that emerged in Europe during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The main difference being that these were standing armies that did not restrict production in the agricultural economy as members of the surplus population were able to step in and keep production undisturbed. 294 Benedict Anderson hints at how the dissolution of feudalism and the development of the capitalist mode of production lays the foundation for these imagined new communities but his focus on languages erases the effects that the mode of production had on the state’s need to manage populations (particularly in physically moving them to where labour was needed) in which it is hard to see how standardizing communication could be the primary objective for the nation-state. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 42-43.

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Thus, it is important to examine how the idea and the emergence of the nation are related to the creation of surplus populations in which universal conscription plays a key role.

The overall argument that I present in this chapter is that the possibility of universal conscription is not only dependent on the prior creation of a relative surplus population but that once enacted it serves to reconstitute this population with a steady flow of bodies that, after fighting on the battlefield, must now navigate and struggle against an intangible foe: the labour market. In this sense, universal conscription acts as a spatial solution to the problem of surplus populations as it transports bodies from rural areas to urban ones thus helping to manipulate the spatially constrained nature of labour power.295 To unfold the basis of this argument, I will first turn to two works by E. H. Norman that investigate both the origins of the relative surplus population and conscription in Japan. While Norman clearly explains how these two populations came to be, it seems that he never explicitly connects them as being two sides of the same coin, so to speak. From there, the focus will turn to what this means for the project of nation-building given that universal conscription is so closely tied to the emergence of nationalism and the theorizing of the relation between the citizen and the state. Using Gavin Walker’s investigation into the national question, I want to connect how conscription and the ‘contractually-constituted citizen-subject’ relate to the everyday functioning and circulation of capital within the discourse of universal conscription. Finally, this chapter will conclude by looking at the figure of the soldier in relation to Yasukuni Shrine from the standpoint of surplus populations. If the statue of

Ōmura can remind us of how the shrine fit into the state’s management of these populations then

295 For more on the geographical limitations of thinking about the labour market, see Harvey, The Urban Experience, 127-135.

182 perhaps it can also help us understand how the mode of exchange of the nation works to smooth over the excesses produced by a capitalist economy.

4.1 E. H. Norman and the Figure of the Peasant Soldier

The scholarship of the historian E. H. Norman has always been a contentious topic in the field of Japanese studies. The son of Canadian missionaries lived a fascinating life being born and raised in Japan, educated at the University of Toronto, Cambridge and Harvard, and then later worked as a Canadian diplomat in Japan and Egypt before committing suicide in 1957 while being hunted down by the U. S. government after being accused as a Soviet spy. Despite how the last years of his life unfolded, Norman remained a respected and pioneering leader in the field of Japanese studies. The publication of his dissertation, Japan’s Emergence as a Modern

State, in 1940 was not only well received by scholars in the West and Japan but it also had a strong influence on Japanese studies over the next decade. However, Norman’s work was soon forgotten and ignored as the U. S. occupation of Japan came to an end. As John Dower claims in his essay “E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History,” Norman’s writings were discredited because of his politically motivated scholarship which stood at odds with the postwar objectives of American foreign policy in Asia.296 Throughout the 1950s, scholarship on Japan would be strongly influenced by Harvard’s Reischauer School which desired to create an ideology to

296 John Dower, “E. H. Norman, Japan and the Uses of History,” in Origins of the Modern Japanese State (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 33.

183 compete with Marxist scholarship which had dominated the writing of history in Japan.297 This competing ideology took the form of modernization theory which was sold as a progressive project worldwide. By 1970, not only was modernization theory the driving force behind scholarship on Japan but Japan had become a model country for development theory. When John

Dower republished an anthology of Norman’s writings in 1975, it was directed at questioning the politics espoused by the modernization school and how Norman’s work might offer a more balanced approach, especially to the study of the prewar period of Japanese history. The renewed interest in Norman’s work in the early 1970s according to Cyril Powles came out of “a common background of resistance to U.S. aggression in Vietnam.”298 However, in response even more commentaries discrediting Norman emerged in which it became even clearer that Norman’s politics stood at odds with the Reischauer School.

The treatment of Norman’s scholarship within the field of Japanese studies is arguably symptomatic of the same shortfalls that are produced by the conventional historiography of

Yasukuni Shrine that is such a prominent feature in the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ discourse. One of the main practices of modernization theory is to treat the development of capitalism as a natural phenomenon, which neutralizes its role in shaping social relations. It accomplishes this aim largely by simply putting the term ‘modern’ as a placeholder for the word capital and thus

297 At a 1949 Department of State Conference, Reischauer pleaded that the people of Asia were “asking for an ideology. We have in many ways failed to give it to them. There is a crying need for people to have our ideology but we aren’t presenting it to other people.” Taken from the “Transcript of Round Table Discussion on American Policy Toward China Held in the Department of State, October 6-8, 1949,” as cited in John Dower. 298 Cyril Powles, “E. H. Norman as a Historian: A Canadian Perspective,” Pacific Affairs, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Winter, 1977-1978), 662.

184 attributes the material and social products of capitalism to a stage of human development.299

Much like the treatment of Norman’s scholarship under the Reischauer modernization school, the historical discourse of Yasukuni Shrine has also focussed on the shrine as a ‘modern’ institution of state power, which erases the relation between Capital-Nation-State that formed the conditions for its historical emergence. Thus to bring back Norman into this discourse is also to reclaim a specific understanding and approach to history that recognizes that the modern is as

Marx said “a constant revolutionizing of the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”300 When Norman’s writings were revived by Lawrence T. Woods in the year 2000, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Japan’s Emergence, the themes of politics and the act of forgetting once again dominated the discussion. This time, various scholars of Japanese studies or people who had personal connections to Norman offered their own commentaries. That most of these contributors praised Norman’s work and illustrated how it had influenced their own scholarship perhaps points to a revival of his presence in the field and a return to some of the important historical inquiries that he raised through his writings. It is within this context, as the sixtieth anniversary of his death is just around the corner, that I offer a re-reading of two of Norman’s prominent works into a discussion on relative surplus populations. In particular, I hope to re- establish some of Norman’s key arguments that he made discussing the Meiji settlement which I believe can contribute to our understanding of the historical emergence of Yasukuni Shrine.

299 The title of this project (Capital-Nation-State: A Genealogy of Yasukuni Shrine) seeks to re-establishe the place of capital within a critique of our current social-political system instead of the more common reading of the modern nation-state. 300 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore (New York: Washington Square Press, 1964), 62-63.

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In 1943, E. H. Norman published Soldier and Peasant in Japan: the Origins of

Conscription which has received little attention in the English-speaking world even to this day despite having been well-received in Japan after its translation in 1948.301 The piece was originally published in two separate parts in consecutive issues of the Pacific Affairs journal in which Norman outlined a linear history of the participation of Japanese peasants in warfare in order to examine some indigenous factors that lead to the 1873 Conscription Edict. His research showed that peasant participation in warfare was a common occurrence and that the feudal creation of a separate military class was the historical exception. Closely reading the re- emergence of the idea of the peasant soldier (nōhei) in Tokugawa political thought, Norman recognized the revolutionary nature of such discussions. Thus, in his analysis, Norman was mainly concerned with the question of whether the peasant soldier is an emancipatory figure. He stated that the overarching debate centered on “whether [they] should remain serfs bound to both the land and the lord while serving as a peasant militia or whether they should be emancipated peasants freely joining volunteer armies which were struggling against feudalism.”302 This line of inquiry culminated into Norman’s well-known critique of the historical significance of the

Meiji Restoration in that it was a top-heavy autocratic revolution that displayed strong counterrevolutionary tendencies towards the population.

301 John Dower made this point in the 1970s and it is probably still pertinent today. Origins of the Modern Japanese State, 3. 302 Norman, “Soldier and Peasant in Japan: The Origins of Conscription,” 60.

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Nonetheless, the significance of these debates had a profound effect on the political leaders of the Meiji State and, after the restoration was secured, the figure of the nōhei remained an important political project.303 As Norman states:

the nōhei system as it appeared in all its complexity at the end of the Tokugawa period goes far beyond the mere giving of arms to peasants for the purpose of training them as troops to supplement the Tokugawa or clan armies. It was a problem which cut to the very root of a feudalism that had been obstructing every avenue of advance whether in the political, social, or cultural field. Thus a new military system called for a new social organization (italics added).304

Within this argument for freeing the peasant from feudal class relations in order to turn them into soldiers belies an important, much larger project of the state, which was in turn carried out with the land reforms that formally released the peasants from their feudal chains. For those who are familiar with Norman’s work, it is hard to see why he concluded this line of thought here and did not continue it to its logical conclusion by looking at how the process of primitive accumulation fed into the type of social organization that was necessary for the creation of a conscript army.

Freeing the peasants from feudal social relations was only possible with the full emancipation of the peasant class by also freeing them from the means of their own subsistence.305 Therefore, it can be concluded that it is not a coincidence that the Conscription Edict and the Land Tax

303 It is interesting to note that the academic interest in the figure of the nōhei occurred in the late 1930s as Japan was forming the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Norman is obviously trying to historically situate this concern within the context of the Meiji Restoration while ignoring the present context to which these discussions are finding a renewed interest. In Japanese see Ono Takeo, Nihon Heinō Shiron (Tokyo: Yūhikaku, 1938) and Katō Shunjirō, Heinō Shokumin Seisaku (Tokyo: Keio Shobō, 1941). 304 Ibid., 61. 305 As Marx states: “Free workers, in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case with self-employed peasant proprietors. The free workers are therefore free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own.” Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 874.

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Reforms both occurred in the same year as they both aimed at creating an emancipated peasant population. While Norman does not take the discussion this far, he does conclude that in this sense the implementation of universal conscription in Japan should be read as categorically different from conscription in Europe which he claims was democratic and revolutionary in nature. This is because in Japan conscription was initiated by the state prior to the promulgation of the constitution and without any type of political representation and thus was never enveloped with a discourse of civil duty or some sort of contractual agreement with the state. However, without this political discourse that was always enshrouded with a crude nationalism, Norman’s scholarship really clarifies that what is at stake with the question of universal conscription is the question of freedom; but not freedom as in the problem of forcing free citizens to fight for their country but in the second sense of Marx’s famous rebuttal, in that the peasant class were freed from the means of production and thus they were turned into an always-already floating population to be conscripted.

Free from the means of production is the main focus of the second Norman piece that I want to analyse. The fifth chapter of Norman’s published dissertation Japan’s Emergence as a

Modern State is titled “The Agrarian Settlement and its Social Consequences.” In this chapter, he examines how the land reforms of the Meiji state helped create a wage labour population by making land alienable. At first, the Land Tax Reform of 1873 seemed to be an emancipatory act as it gave ownership to those who worked the land freeing them from the dominance of the feudal daimyo. Nonetheless, over the next decade, the reforms began to show their

‘counterrevolutionary’ character as land was now at the mercy of the market which favoured those who could compete through exchanges mediated by money. The dispossession of the peasantry occurred through a myriad of circumstances but they all emerged from the same

188 source: the institution of private property which freed them from their feudal bonds only to become subordinate to the less-paternal commodity market. As Norman states:

The position of the small landowner working his own piece of land was precarious in the extreme, subject to all the vicissitudes of nature (bad crops, storms, blight) and of society (fluctuations in the price of rice) and yet unable to escape the responsibility of paying a fixed amount of cash every year to the government as tax. To meet this demand the peasant proprietor could give up the struggle to remain on the land, dispose of his tiny plot by sale, or resort to the village usurer and so enter upon the long uphill path of debt payments, which might end at any time in foreclosure.306

Since the small-landholding peasantry were forced to depend on the market in order to pay taxes, it quickly created winners and losers. Many of those who could not successfully exchange their goods on the market resorted to selling their land to large landowners becoming tenants freeing them of the responsibility to pay the land tax. This process of dispossession was recorded by the

German agricultural expert, Paul Mayet, who noted that, between 1883 and 1890, almost

368,000 small landholders were forced to sell their property because they could not pay the land tax. The land that was confiscated and auctioned off by the state was roughly 116,000 acres and was worth almost 5 million yen which was 27 times the amount of arrears. Mayet also offers some specific examples of how this process unfolded throughout Japan:307

• In December of 1883, the Mainichi Shinbun reported that over half of the

farmers from Taguchi-mura and Minami Sakuma-gōri sold their property

because of high debt and they only received one-third of the value in return.

306 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 143. 307 Mayet, 65-67.

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• In May 1884, the Jiji Shinpō noted that in Osumi-mura (Yamaguchi-ken) all

but a few of the 400 families declared bankruptcy collectively owing 170,000

yen.

• In November 1884, over 900 farmers declared bankruptcy and auctioned their

houses in order to pay the land tax owing from August of that year.

These few examples show the degree to which the peasant farmers were being pushed off of their land through the ‘natural processes’ of the market. However, the bankruptcy and dispossession of the peasantry did not occur without a fight. Mayet records that, in May of 1884, the money lender Usaburō and his son were murdered by a mob of desperate farmers in

Kanagawa. While at least eleven farmers participated in the act, it was estimated that around two to three hundred people helped connive with them. The anger and frustration exhibited by the peasants was also the theme of Mikiso Hane’s book on what he called the “underside of Modern

Japan.”308 However, Norman shows this process of creating a labour work force was a necessary part of industrialization.

Norman concludes his discussion of the creation of a relative surplus population by noting how the dispossession of the peasantry did not necessarily result in mass urbanization as it did with the English Enclosure Laws in Britain. This is because, in Japan, the landowning class preferred to collect high rents from the peasant farmers as opposed to kicking them off the land and using capital to revolutionize the agricultural sector. Since peasants remained on the land, although at only a subsistent level, they could send children away to work in the city between

308 Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, & Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).

190 harvests instead of a full migration. This is why Norman calls this floating population a stagnant surplus population because a lot of the rural peasants were “living in that limbo between agricultural employment, which is closed behind them, and urban industry which has not yet opened before them.”309 In fact, it is not until the early 1900s that a mass migration to the cities became evident due to demand for labour in industrial jobs.

It would seem that the overlap between these two essays by Norman is obvious and yet he does not explicitly make any direct connections between the issue of primitive accumulation and the conscription system in Japan even though he theoretically establishes the possibility of this connection. His conclusion that a stagnant surplus population emerged in Japan seems to overlap with the implementation of universal conscription and thus will act as the background to my discussion of the Japanese conscription system later in this chapter. The other aspect of

Norman’s stagnant surplus population that I want to discuss is that it still carried out the same function within a capitalist economy that any relative surplus population fulfills. That is, it acts to suppress wages by giving capitalists the option of firing current employees since there is a labour pool waiting and literally begging for work. Not only does this suppress wages across the board but it also lowers working conditions in general as the relative surplus population acts to increase the precariousness of the working class. In the end, the only thing that is different from a stagnant surplus population is the spatial component of which universal conscription would help solve.

While surplus populations generally contribute to the process of urbanization due to the lack of opportunities in the countryside, a stagnant surplus population remains attached to the

309 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 159.

191 rural land as tenants. However, this condition only further points to the correlation between the creation of a surplus population and universal conscription since the conscripted population historically came from the rural area. This process was not particular to Japan either since the emergence of universal conscription around the world temporally aligns with the historical unfolding of the process of primitive accumulation. So, while historical studies on conscription generally look at how it was tied to a sense of national or civic duty, I want to break down that discourse and look at how the national army was contingent on the process of primitive accumulation and its relation to a national body.

4.2 Universal Conscription, Primitive Accumulation, and the

Nation

Universal conscription emerged during the French Revolution originally as a pressing matter of national defense. When the young French Republic introduced the levée en masse on

August 23, 1793, it was under the threat of attack from the monarchies of Europe and thus the call to arms was met with revolutionary enthusiasm. As a piece of legislation produced by the radical Jacobin Clubs, the appeal of creating a national army of conscripts retained its revolutionary ideals by removing the army from the hands of the royalists and aristocrats with the hope of making it an extension of the people’s political wishes. In this sense, the political discourse that shaped the concept of universal conscription derived from democratic ideals of emancipation regardless of whether or not it historically unfolded in this manner. Nonetheless, the rhetoric that supported the implementation of universal conscription across Europe latched onto these ideals and it spearheaded the project of nation-building through what was later termed

192 the ‘nation-at-arms’. Another characteristic of this discourse is that universal conscription became increasingly tied to an economic language of social contracts between the citizen and the state. Conscription was now characterized as a civic duty that citizens must perform in exchange for the rights that they were guaranteed under the constitution. While these discourses have a long historical and legal legacy, they tend to mask the social-historical origins of conscription and its role in managing populations. Through interrogating these discourses I want to describe how universal conscription itself is a product of the capitalist mode of production but one that employs the concept of the nation to suture the disparities and excesses of the contradictions embedded into capitalism.

If we further examine this first attempt at universal conscription by the French Republic, the difficulties of conscription as a means to break down feudal class divisions, as suggested by the revolutionary government, become glaringly evident. In particular, the call for bodies was overcoded by spatial relations that resulted from an emerging commodity economy that had somewhat radicalized the urban working class and thus replicated the urban-rural divide.310

While those in the city were quick to enlist and meet quotas largely due to their active participation in the revolution, the rural peasants were less inclined to acquiesce and resisted any form of conscription. Although Napoleon’s ideal quota was set at one conscript per 138 citizens, the historian Charles J. Esdaile notes that, in Finistére (in the west part of Brittany), rural resistance was so strong that only one in 4,930 were conscripted.311 The other glaring problem

310 Enlisting urban populations to fight was common place in France in 1789, as two-thirds of all recruits were from urban areas despite the urban population only being twenty percent. Peter Paret, Understanding War: Essays on Clausewitz and the History of Military Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 57. 311 This data is taken from 1801 which means the resistance probably also correlates with the role of the army as an offensive force fighting across Europe as opposed to its defensive role at the outset of conscription. Charles J. Esdaile, The Wars of Napoleon (New York: Longman, 1995), 56.

193 for understanding conscription as a revolutionary act against the old regime was the implementation of exemption rules. At any time, those who were conscripted by the state were allowed to send a substitute in their place for a fee. As France’s revolutionary war progressed, the fees increased from 300 francs in1800 to 6500 in 1811.312 Other methods of evading universal conscription for those of means included the procurement of government posts or simply bribing doctors to declare they were unfit for service. In other words, universal conscription was hardly emancipatory nor was it revolutionary for those at the lower rungs of society. In fact, it was the most precarious members of society that generally filled the file and rank positions of the conscript armies.

The use of the lower classes to fight in armies does not necessarily emerge with the implementation of universal conscription in France but it does point to a transition from a standing professional army to one entirely composed of conscripts. As I alluded to earlier, the key to understanding this transition is the process of creating a floating population that could produce the possibility for and facilitate the indiscriminate extraction of labourers from the economy. This floating population thus served to fill the ranks of military battalions or replace labourers in various industries of production. The military historian Peter Paret notes how military recruitment relied heavily on volunteers to supplement their professional forces prior to the French Revolution in both France and Germany.313 Along with the use of paid foreign mercenaries—which composed roughly ten percent of the French Army as late as 1789 and as many as a third of the Prussian army—volunteers filled the majority of the positions although the

312 Ibid., 56. 313 Paret has written extensively on the German military strategist Carl von Clausewitz and launched the “Clausewitz Project” at Princeton University in the 1960s which later produced the standard translation of Clausewitz’s classic text On War.

194 degree to which they legitimately volunteered is questionable. Paret states in Prussia that recruiting volunteers was often undertaken “by persuasion, trickery, and even force” and that in both countries it mainly affected the poor since volunteering for military service was sometimes the only means of livelihood.314 In the case of Prussia in the early 1800s, Paret suggests that the canton system of recruitment imposed a “long-term military service on a minority of young men of the poorest groups of the population, almost without exception serfs, journeymen, and the urban unemployed.”315 The transition from professional armies, often comprised of a military class, to a more nationalized army consisting mainly of peasants is thus marked by the appearance of a floating population that do not have the means to produce their own subsistence.

Perhaps a good counterpoint to the historical examples of the French and Prussian experience is to briefly discuss the American Revolution and their approach to universal conscription.

In Max Edling’s book, A Revolution in Favor of Government, his chapter dealing with the creation of a national army is aptly (and somehow still relevant) titled “An Impotent Congress.”

While Edling uses this term to describe how the Confederation Congress was handcuffed when it came to forming a military because of the anti-federalists and opposition from colonists who left

Europe to escape such demands by the state, it is an appropriate term for describing state power at that historical moment. Even during the American Revolutionary War the state had problems enlisting men which greatly hindered the war effort. As Edling argues,

the eagerness of soldiers to return to civilian life and the reluctance of civilians to volunteer for army service left gaps in the ranks. These gaps were filled by militia units, which served for a specified and very short period of time, anything from two weeks to a few months, and only within a certain area—they normally

314 Paret, 54. 315 Ibid., 55.

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refused to march beyond their own state… In a comparative perspective, America’s “surplus” population of economically marginal men, the traditional source of army recruits, was not very large.316

That Edling points to the impotence of the state in relation to the lack of a surplus population is an important argument in his later discussion on the relation between militias and conscripts.

Without a floating population who are in a sense forced to sell their labour power by becoming soldiers for the state, the state lacks an instrument of violence that could potentially produce this necessary floating population. Ernest Mandel locates this particular problem as something that materialized from the impossibility of instituting private property in the U.S. due to the presence of the Western ‘frontier’. Mandel states that, “so long as there are vast expanses of land available, urban labour-power has a refuge from the factory prison, there is practically no industrial reserve army, and wages may well rise in consequence of competition between industrial and agricultural employment.”317 He goes on to note that American politicians recognized this fact and at times tried to stop western migration because if land was cheap then labour was expensive. Joseph Dorfman, a professor of economics at Columbia University, writes about the fear that these politicians had regarding their own invested interests in landed property:

“A low price of land—that is, below the “fair” or intrinsic value—makes common labor too expensive. No freeman will work for another if he can buy good land sufficiently cheap to provide him comfortable subsistence with two days’ labor a week.”318

316 Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 78. 317 Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory Vol. I, translated by Brian Pearce (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 286. 318 Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606-1865 (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1966), 338. Also cited in Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory Vol. I, 287.

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This example of the American attempt to form a national standing army similar to those in Europe clearly shows the necessity of forming a floating population prior to any form of conscription. It also points to the system of landownership as an important factor in creating a floating population. If people were able to obtain land and provide their own subsistence then it was almost impossible to bring them into the labour market. Back in Europe, the volunteer system of recruiting marked a gradual shift that mirrored the transition that was taking place in social relations from a feudalist economy to a capitalist one. As floating populations began to emerge after land reforms and strides towards an industrial economy, life in the army opened up an avenue for the possibility of selling one’s labour power. Thus, it leads to the conclusion that the implementation of universal conscription can only successfully emerge once a capitalist economy appears as a closed system of circulation; that is, one that appears capable of reproducing its own circulation. However, before describing how this process historically unfolded in Japan, I want to turn to the more common understanding of universal conscription as a social contract between the citizen and the state to establish how the above analysis of floating populations and conscription also marks the emergence of the idea of the nation.

The words of Napoleon Bonaparte in the epigraph319 explicitly state the necessity of conscription for the well-being and strength of the nation. This identification of the military and the nation is now common sense to us today and perhaps it is why these words just seem to enforce our contemporary understanding of how modern armies play a role in nation-building.

Despite the end of universal conscription in the majority of nations, historians and military strategists continue to focus on the army as an institution that portrays the ideal citizen-state

319 “The conscription is the vitality of a nation, the purification of its morality and the real foundations of all its habits.”

197 relation. The second part of the quote seems to capture a more Foucauldian understanding of the place of the military within the social body. If it is the rituals and practices of the state that purifies the citizens and governs their actions, no wonder Foucault began his chapter on discipline and docile bodies with the figure of the soldier. Not only was the military system the archetypal disciplining apparatus for other state institutions but it also was the template of the social body itself.320 While Foucault’s focus on state power and the production of disciplined subjects confronts the totalizing institution of the state, he argues that, if we only look to the state in order to critique power, it will simply produce a circular logic that links one institution of power to another. To break out of this circularity and thus ‘de-institutionalize and de- functionalize’ relations of power an appeal needs to be made to its genealogy. Foucault even gives the example of an army:

We may say that the disciplinarization of the army is due to its control by the state (étatisation). However, when disciplinarization is connected, [not] with a concentration of state control, but with the problem of floating populations, the importance of commercial networks, technical inventions, …a whole network of alliance, support, and communication constitutes the “genealogy” of military discipline.321

With this quote, it is obvious that Foucault points to the relation of the army to floating populations as one that is structured on disciplining bodies but it is a relation that does not materialize from the state itself. Rather it emerges from the various apparatuses and appendages of the market, in other words, from the mode of production. However, Foucault is more

320 As Foucault states: “While jurists and philosophers were seeking in the pact a primal model for the construction or the reconstruction of the social body, the soldiers and with them the technicians of discipline were elaborating procedures for the individual and collective coercion of bodies.” Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 169. 321 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1977-78, edited by Michel Senellart and translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 119.

198 interested in how this floating population might be managed in the sphere of circulation as opposed to how they came to be.322 Instead of looking at how conscription became a part of the disciplinary apparatus of the modern state, my own departure will take Bonaparte’s quote even more literally and look at how conscription and surplus populations, which create the conditions for the possibility of universal conscription, were indeed the “vitality” or the source of life for the nation.

The historical emergence of universal conscription was closely tied to the shift in political philosophy that argued for the transition from monarchical rule to that of popular sovereignty. Such thinkers as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in particular argued, for a new relationship with the state mediated by a social contract in which individuals relinquished certain rights to the state in exchange for their own security.323 This acted to give legitimacy to state power and authority as well as the law, since according to Rousseau the law should be an expression of the general will. I focus on these two philosophers because, in the late eighteenth century, it is their writing that produces the intellectual grounding for including conscription as an element of the social contract with the state. One key factor is that both Locke and Rousseau espouse the democratic foundation of the social contract and therefore recognize the need to include all members of society.

Locke’s position on conscription is not as clear since he never directly engages with the topic as he died almost a century before universal conscription was used during the French

322 Ken Kawashima discusses the problem of ‘floating populations’ in Foucault’s thought as an extension of Marx’s writings on the relative surplus population and notes that Foucault’s reading detects the contingencies of floating populations as they come up against various state apparatuses of security in their search for a buyer of their labour power in the sphere of circulation. 323 Other political philosophers who discuss the social contract are Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls.

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Revolution.324 Nonetheless, his political theory on the issue of rights and the citizen’s relation to the state played an important role in producing the conditions that made universal conscription possible. For Locke, the discourse on rights has to be founded on the premise that they belong to humankind outside of the state and that the state can only “preserve” these rights. This reasoning led Locke to conclude that property over the body could only emanate from that person and thus he famously stated “every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his…

For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to.”325 The claim that everyone “has a property in his own person” is the phrase that I want to elaborate on and connect to the historical emergence of floating populations and the national question.

As Gavin Walker has argued, the contractual relationship which creates the citizen was a key feature of defining the borders of the nation-state through the “production of difference by means of an oscillation or torsion between inclusion and exclusion.”326 This movement emerged as a result of primitive accumulation as it not only freed the peasant from the feudal class structure but also it created the possibility of demarcating the individual.327 Another important

324 The political philosophy of John Locke has often been used to argue against universal conscription particularly during the 1960s when the draft was being expanded during the Vietnam War. David J. Dawson, the President of the Metropolitan Young Republicans in New York during the 1960s, wrote many articles in his journal Persuasion arguing that compulsory service was essentially the state’s seizure of rights and a reversion back to the old monarchies of Europe. 325 John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (London, 1821), 209-210. 326 Gavin Walker, “Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar” in Postmodern Culture, (22.3) special issue on the work of Étienne Balibar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, May 2013). 327 Walker discusses this process in further detail in “Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt,” in Rethinking Marxism, vol. 23, no. 3 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 400. “The process of

200 aspect of Walker’s argument is that this movement of inclusion and exclusion is really a tracing of the movement that occurs within the necessary labouring population and the surplus labour population. As stated above, the capitalist mode of production produces a relative surplus population in part because this is the only way that it can complete its internal circulation because labour power stands outside of its capacity to directly produce labour power as a commodity. What this oscillation and torsion allows for is the production of a new type of social organization predicated on the nation-state which swoops in to code these populations. In this sense, it is the form of the nation-state through the management of surplus populations that intervenes into the process of capital if only to assert its own legitimacy as the paternal adjudicator.328 Thus Walker concludes that, “this logic of the citizen as the bearer of this strange property of his or her own person called labour power shows us how the contemporary management of the nation-state is inseparably linked to the reproduction of the aggregate capital.”329

primitive accumulation, does not make the old practices into new ones: it insinuates itself within the flux of practices and establishes a surrounding order in which to compute and recode them, it gives them a ‘‘new social soul.’’ Thereafter, this order overdetermines these practices such that they come to be retrospectively ‘‘proven’’ by the existence of the ‘‘national people’’ whose existence they, in fact, are paradoxically supposed to prove. This circularity of identity is precisely what is installed historically by the movement of primitive accumulation; it is precisely this aspect of the enclosures that we should read in Marx when he emphasizes that it is ‘‘economic conditions’’ that ‘‘create conditions and differences among peoples independent of the ‘State’’’ (Marx 1989b, 507).” 328 See Walker’s “The World of Principle, or Pure Capitalism: Exteriority and Suspension in Uno Kōzō” in The Journal of International Economic Studies, no. 26 (Tokyo: Hōsei University, Institute for Comparative Economic Studies, 2012), 20. “That is, the nation-state must be produced, managed, and maintained, in order for the process of the dissolution of the village to be arrested before it spins out of control. The nation-state, in this sense, is what holds back capital’s axiomatic deterritorialization of itself. It is a “coding” or “valuing” that allows for the management of a set of dynamics that inherently cannot be managed, that is inherently undermining itself. Yet the form of the nation-state also serves as the apparatus by which the dissolution of the village can be undertaken in the first place: in the form of separation, division, and enclosure, it installs the circular legitimation mechanism of landed property, whose image is derived from the state as the ultimate image of the landlord.” 329 Gavin Walker, “Citizen-Subject and the National Question: On the Logic of Capital in Balibar.”

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If the operation of the state is to manage surplus populations within the circulation of capital then it becomes clearer how universal conscription gets tied into the language of a social contract. In Rousseau’s political philosophy, the social contract is an exchange between the individual and the political community. In Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, Louis Althusser critiques the social contract on this basis as one of the parties, the community, does not exist prior to the contract but is an outcome of the contract producing a total alienation.330 This gap is traversed in Rousseau’s thought by civic practices which in effect create the community that does not exist prior to the contract. As Thomas Hippler suggests, military service is a unique type of civic practice in that it not only helps to make individuals into a community but that it also functions to establish state power within this community through the individual. He concludes that:

in Rousseau’s political philosophy military service plays an eminent theoretical role because it links the production of political individuality to the production of political community. It may be considered as the concrete institutional location where the ‘total alienation of each individual with all his rights to the community as a whole’ materially takes place.331

According to Hippler, universal conscription produced the conditions for a political community by becoming the other side of the exchange: the materialization of security.332 This theoretical formation of the citizen-soldier was essentially what Rousseau had imagined in his discussions of militias. He stated that:

330 This is the first of four discrepancies that Althusser makes of Rousseau’s theorization of the social contract. Louis Althusser, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, translated by Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1972), 129. 331 Thomas Hippler, Citizens, Soldiers and National Armies: Military Service in France and Germany, 1789-1830 (New York: Routledge, 2008), 37. 332 Later in the book Hippler states that the military is “the social sphere in which the nation ‘came into contact with itself’ and could thus acquire self-consciousness.”Ibid., 174.

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regular armies have been the scourge and ruin of Europe. They are good for only two things: attacking and conquering neighbours, and fettering and enslaving citizens…. The state’s true defenders are its individual citizens, no one of whom should be a professional soldier, but each of whom should serve as a soldier as duty requires. 333

So through the creation of citizen-soldiers Rousseau theoretically completes the exchange that is proposed in the social contract. In this sense, universal conscription links together two different modes of exchange: first, the nation and secondly, the state. The mode of exchange of the nation is the gift which is given, not through conscription in itself, but in the offering of total alienation within the social contract. This initial offer has no possibility of exchange since it is being given to a party that does not yet exist thus it can be presented as a gift. The second mode of exchange

(that of the state) is thus the other side of the contract in that it first plunders and then redistributes. In this case the plundering takes the form of literal bodies through which the materialization of the social contract is complete as the political community provides security to the individual. However, if we return to Althusser’s critique of Rousseau, another interesting observation can be made on the nature of this exchange.

Althusser insists that, due to the nature of the social contract and the ipso facto creation of the second party (the political community), there is, in fact, no exchange and yet what is produced is the possibility of exchange itself. The individual must offer total alienation by giving everything for the sake of creating a political community.334 Within this offering, Althusser locates a movement in Rousseau’s thought that resembles the oscillation and torsion that Walker

333 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Government of Poland, translated by Willmoore Kendall (Indianapolis: Bobbs- Merrill, 1972), 81. 334 Althusser writes that “Rousseau poses as the a priori condition of any possible exchange this total alienation which no exchange will compensate.” Politics and History, 135.

203 described in the creation of a national community. This movement diverges from the Hobbesian model where total alienation is given over to absolute power (the Prince).

Rousseau’s defense against Hobbes is to transform total alienation in externality into total alienation in internality: the Third Recipient Party then becomes the Second, the Prince becomes the Sovereign, which is the community itself, to which free individuals totally alienate themselves without losing their liberty, since the Sovereign is simply the community of these same individuals.335

Essentially what Althusser locates in Rousseau’s thought is the historical unfolding of primitive accumulation and the capitalist mode of exchange where equality is achieved only in the process of producing the possibility of exchange but not necessarily in the exchange itself. For Rousseau, universal conscription played an important role in this transition as it helped recognize the political subject within a national community which is why he associated military service directly with the right to vote.336 While he does not recognize the social conditions which produced these possibilities, I would argue that this was the method in which political philosophers of the time engaged with the issue revolving around the relation between the state and the individual within the transition from a feudal society to a capitalist one. Thus, firmly embedded within the political theorization of both Locke and Rousseau, is the production of surplus populations and their relation to the nation-state.

335 Ibid., 136. 336 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract; Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero; Political Fragments; and, Geneva Manuscript: The Collected Writings of Rousseau Vol. 4, edited by Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hannover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1994), 191-192.

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4.3 Japan’s Conscription System in the Meiji Period

Studies on the 1873 Conscription Edict generally attempt to assess to what degree it emulated modern European armies or whether it was more reactionary and derived from indigenous practices. While these studies are important for tracing the characteristics of universal conscription in Japan, they do little to help understand the historical conditions out of which such an edict could emerge. This chapter has tried to provide that background by studying the social- historical implications of universal conscription as a product of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Now I will turn to the particular aspects of how the 1873 Conscription Edict was instituted to show the historical relation between surplus populations and universal conscription in Japan.

The imperial army that fought during the Boshin War was generally made up of samurai from the western provinces of Japan that sought to restore the position of the emperor in place of the Tokugawa Shogunate. However, despite their military successes against the bakufu, once there was no enemy to fight the cohesion of the imperial forces showed some major cracks. In particular the regional lines re-emerged as the military leaders from Satsuma, Chōshū, and Tosa began to position themselves for political power and influence within the Meiji government.

Saigō Takamori and Ōmura Masujirō, of Satsuma and Chōshū respectively, had emerged as the dominant figures within the military elite but both men had very divergent opinions on what form a national army should take. Saigō wanted to maintain the status quo which meant staffing the army by filling quotas from loyal han and with men from the warrior class. On the other hand, Ōmura, who, in the early 1860s, had filled his rank-and-file with peasants in forming the kiheitai advocated a centralized conscript army followed by the abolishment of the warrior

205 class.337 With the death of Ōmura in 1869 this debate was postponed as the state became increasingly concerned with security measures across the country from counterrevolutionaries.338 In the meantime it was decided in 1871 that the three han would contribute 10,000 soldiers to the creation of the Imperial Guard which would act to consolidate state power by putting down any counterattacks and threats to the new government. This act however, did not console the Tosa leader, Itagaki Taisuke, who was already worried about the monopolization of government posts by the Satsuma-Chōshū alliance.339 In the end, these early attempts of filling quotas were disbanded when the han were abolished (haihan-chiken) in 1871 making way for a centralized conscription system.

The Conscription Edict was officially announced on November 28, 1872, and then promulgated on January 10, 1873. In the first announcement is found the now infamous phrase

‘bloodtax” (ketsuzei) which ignited a decade of peasant protests under the literal understanding that the state was out to collect the peasant’s blood.340 However, the majority of the text

337 For more on the kiheitai in Japanese see Tanaka Akira, Takasugi Shinsaku to Kiheitai (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1985) and Ichisaka Tarō, Takasugi Shinsaku to Chōshū (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2014). In English see Albert Craig, “Japan in Transition: The Restoration Movement in Choshu,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2 (February, 1959) and Edward J. Drea, Japan’s Imperial Army: Its Rise and Fall, 1853-1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 338 Generally this took the appearance of bands of disgruntled samurai who made indiscriminate attacks against Meiji bureaucrats or foreign residents. Sir Ernest Satow, the Secretary of the British Legation in Tokyo, describes his experience of post-Restoration Japan by stating that the “murder of a foreigner [was] an ordinary, every-day affair” in A Diplomat in Japan (London: Seeley, Service & Co. Limited, 1921), 55. 339 Itagaki continued to fight against the Satsuma-Chōshū dominance in the Meiji government into the 1880s as a leader of the Freedom and People’s Rights Movement (Jiyū Minken Undō) which pushed for a democratically elected legislature as well as the institution of civil rights. 340 An example of this is in Shizuoka where it was suggested that “[the state] will draft young men, hang them upside down, and draw out their blood so that Westerners can drink it. What the Westerners in Yokohama are drinking—something called wine, it is said—is actually the blood of these young men. The blood is also used to dye the army blankets, uniforms, and caps.” From Okada Akio et al, Nihon no Rekishi Vol. 10 (Tokyo: Yomiuri Shinbunsha, 1959-1960), 198. As quoted in Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels & Outcasts: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 18.

206 focussed on the question of the relation of the soldier to the state. Just as Norman had argued, the figure of the soldier was used to represent the political transition from a feudal to a modern society. While Norman was interested in the question of emancipation within a revolutionary context, the government used the figure of the nōhei to invoke a historical image of the emperor as the leader of a national army. As is written in the mandate of the November 28, 1872, document,

According to our ancient institutions, there was no one in the country who was not a soldier. In cases of emergency, all the able bodied men were enlisted in the army, under the command of the emperor. When the service was over, they returned home, resuming their duties as farmers, mechanics, or merchants. They were indeed very different from the so-called Bushi of the later times, who always wore swords, led an easy life, and were arrogant and shameless, and murdered innocent people with impunity… (When the bakufu was in control) the country was divided into clans and the people into soldiers and farmers. In later times all these institutions were thrown into a state of confusion, thereby causing innumerable grievances. In the Meiji Reformation, the lords of the different clans returned their fiefs to the Emperor, and order was brought out of confusion by the restoration of the prefectural system. The hereditary pensions, with which the idle knights had been favored by their feudal lords were reduced and the traditional privilege of wearing swords was taken from them. The era of freedom is now gradually dawning upon the people. The hereditary distinction between the soldier and the farmer will be done away with.341

In this sense, conscription itself fell under the umbrella of the restorative nature of the Meiji government which obviously in this passage sees itself as correcting the course of feudalism. The assertion that the Meiji state is the genuine revolutionary force is evident in the presentation of the brutality of the feudal class system in which the state will now act as the emancipator of the

341 Takata Yasuma and Ogawa Gotarō, Conscription System in Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1921), 6. Although this text is attributed to Ogawa, in the preface he clearly states that the research and writing of this text was completed by Takata Yasuma. Thus I will retroactively credit Takata as the author of this text by including him in the bibliography.

207 lower classes. However, as was mentioned above, this freedom from the feudal class system was simply a mechanism to reorganize the productive capacities of labour power as managed by the nation-state. This aspect becomes more apparent as the edict outlines the conditions for universal conscription.

The particular details of the 1873 Conscription Edict are similar to those found in Europe

(particularly France and Prussia) during the latter half of the nineteenth century. It begins by explicitly stating that military service is a national duty for all males assumingly meaning that universal service would be enforced regardless of social standing. However, this was qualified by a long list of exemptions that made the first decade of conscription a highly selective process.

The following is a list of exemptions (abbreviated) as outlined in the third section of the edict issued on 10 January, 1873:

1) Those under the height of 155cm (5’1”). 2) Those with serious illnesses or deformities. 3) Any government or prefectural official. 4) Those already training in military or navy schools. 5) Those obtaining specialized education such as medical training, engineering or studying abroad. 6) Heads of families. 7) Those who are heirs in the patriarchal line including grandsons. 8) Those who are the only sons and grandsons in their family. 9) Those who are acting as the family head due to an incapacitated father. 10) Adopted sons. 11) Those who have brothers already in the service. 12) Those who can pay a ‘substitute fee’ of 270 yen.

Given the long list and somewhat open ended categories of exemptions provided by the government, it is easy to see how the process of conscription could actually be manipulated by the state examiners. Although all males from ages 20 to 40 were forced to undertake the conscription examination, the actual demographics of those conscripted were dominated by younger individuals. Edward J. Drea, a military historian of Japan, notes that the first few years

208 of conscription produced an army that was generally compiled of the second and third sons of poor farmers. 342 These rural recruits were also assigned to regional regiments while the urban garrisons, including the Imperial Guard, were generally staffed by former samurai. On top of this, the regional inconsistencies of the draft itself reflected the desire to conscript those from rural areas, such as northeastern Japan, while rejecting urban conscripts.343

Being able to manipulate the process of conscription was important for the new government since the military had to be fashioned into a conservative reactionary force that would immediately be loyal to the aims of the state.344 The army’s main goal in the first decade following the Conscription Edict was thus to maintain peace and order within Japan by quickly fettering out subversive populations. This mandate was evident in how it was used to suppress not only the riots instigated by disgruntled samurai but also the peasant riots which were in part a reaction to the conscription system itself. If the conscription process is understood as the management of a relative surplus population, it becomes easier to imagine how these conscripts could become a conservative force. As Hane notes, the peasants did not accept the state’s justification of conscription and saw it “as a form of forced labour akin to the feudal corveé that they had resented and resisted during the Tokugawa period.”345 However, for those who were

342 Drea, 29. 343 Drea states that in 1876, 85% of conscripts were rejected from Tokyo and Osaka after taking the examination while this number only stood around 70% in northeastern Japan. Ibid., 30. 344 To this end, the military schools that were constructed in the early 1870s included a middle school curriculum alongside the teaching of military technical skills. 345 Hane, 19.

209 already freed from the land and formed part of the floating population, conscription was a chance to sell their labour power in exchange for a wage.346

Another reason why the conscription process could be so selective was that the Japanese

Army in the 1870s was not organized to be an imperialist army in the sense that it would be involved in any international engagements. Throughout the 1870s, the number of conscripts per year averaged close to 10,500 men which only amounted to roughly .3% of the national population. As shown in the table below, the expansion of those in active service was gradually increased prior to the 1890s when Japan first became involved in a major overseas conflict. The

Japanese historian of the conscription system, Katō Yokō, argues that the early years of conscription was largely limited by government finances and thus it is important to understand universal conscription within the confines of the state’s ability to raise capital.347 In the decade following the Conscription Edict the military budget ranged between 15.2-19.5% of government spending and then gradually increased to 31.3% by 1890.348 While these numbers might seem in line with or even high in comparison to contemporary military budgets, it fell far below the expectations of many leading Meiji bureaucrats. As early as 1868, Kido Takayoshi wanted to divert sixty percent of all government revenues to the army and navy.349

346 Takata states that soldiers on average received 19.5 yen as an annual salary for service in 1911 but that most soldiers were unable to save any of this after deductions and some spending on provisions purchased from sutlers in the military base. This meant that many soldiers were being sent money from their families which Takata traces through money orders to military bases. Takata, 198. 347 As was discussed in chapter 3, this makes the purchasing of public debt by Yasukuni Shrine from 1879-1895 even more interesting as it correlates with the fiscal problems of the Japanese state. Katō Yokō, Chōheisei to Kindai Nihon, 1868-1945 (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1996), 68. 348 Muroyama Yoshimasa, Kindai Nihon no Gunji to Zaisei: Kaigun Kakuchō o Meguru Seisaku Keisei Katei (Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1984), 98. 349 Kido Takayoshi. The Diary of Kido Takayoshi, entry for Dec. 12, 1868.

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Table 9: Active Service Army Personnel from 1871-1890

Year Active Service Year Active Service (No. of army divisions) (No. of army divisions) 1871 14,841 (3) 1892 74,000 1872 17,901 (5) 1893 77,000 1873 17,462 (7) 1894 123,000 1874 32,923 1895 130,000 1875 33,096 1896 100,000 (9) 1876 39,439 1897 120,000 (11) 1877 40,078 1898 140,000 (13) 1878 41,933 1899 140,000 1879 44,150 1900 150,000 1880 42,530 1901 150,000 1881 43,419 1902 150,000 1882 46,363 1903 150,000 1883 47,504 1904 900,000 (17) 1884 49,642 1905 990,000 (19) 1885 54,124 1906 200,000 (17) 1886 59,009 1907 220,000 (19) 1887 64,689 1908 225,000 1888 65,015 1909 225,000 1889 66,744 1910 225,000 1890 69,000 1911 225,000 1891 71,500 1912 227,861

From Kindai Sensōshi Gaisetsu, Shiryōshū (Tokyo: Rikusen Gakkai, 1984), 39.

The gradual growth of the Japanese Army was mainly a result of revisions to the

Conscription Edict. In the first two decades of its existence, the edict was revised on three different occasions: in 1879, 1883, and 1889. Each time significant revisions were aimed at expanding the number of conscripts by making certain exemptions more rigid and also extending their service time in the reserves. In 1873, conscripts were made to serve three years of active service before spending a total of four years in the reserves. After the Satsuma Rebellion, which was the first major test for the new conscript army it was decided to expand the reserves to a

211 total of seven years and this was raised to nine years in 1883. The 1883 revisions in particular marked a dramatic shift in the selection of conscripts by making the exemption process more rigorous and by abolishing the substitution fee.350 It also clarified the punishment for evading conscription which was set as a 3 to 300 yen fine or 1-12 months in prison. Similarly, the 1889 revisions continued to limit exemptions and the postponement of service which seemingly would have made the conscription system universal. However, according to Takata Yasuma, despite the more rigorous policing of exemptions conscripts were still disproportionately drawn from the lower classes.

There is, of course, no express provision in the conscription law to make lighter the burden of service for the rich. But the actual result shows that the rich who are entirely free from difficulties in living escape from conscription very often, while those whose families will suffer from difficulties when they are enrolled are enlisted to a great percentage. Not only that, but most of the conscripts from the higher classes enjoy the privilege of the one year volunteer service, because they are usually those who have completed the middle school course… On the other hand, those who have much difficulty in gaining a livelihood have to spend two or three years in the army.351

Thus the lower classes continued to take on the burden of military service despite of the revisions that sought to expand the universal character of the conscription system.

350 Yamagata Aritomo stated that the expansion of the army and navy in 1883 was for preparation for war on the continent which was becoming a more acceptable position among Meiji bureaucrats than in the 1870s. 351 Takata, 228.

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Table 10: Revisions in the Length of Military Service in the Army

Year Active Active Reserve Reserve Total 1873 3 years 2 years 2 years 7 years 1879 3 years 3 years 4 years 10 years 1883 3 years 4 years 5 years 12 years 1889 3 years 4 years 5 years 12 years 1895 3 years 4 years & 4 5 years 12 years & 4 months months 1904 3 years 4 years & 4 10 years 17 years & 4 months months

From Takata and Ogawa, Conscription System in Japan, 58.

The main reason why I have presented these particular statistics regarding the conscription system during the Meiji period is to show the connection between the conscripts and relative surplus populations. In particular I want to bring attention to the year 1883 as it denotes the first major expansion of military forces in Japan as well as being a pertinent year in Paul

Mayet’s investigation on agricultural debt. According to Mayet, the real effects of the 1873 Land

Reform began to appear in the early 1880s as the rate of mortgages, bankruptcies, and compulsory sales dramatically increased across the country. He notes that in Okayama Prefecture alone the amount of yen owed on mortgages for houses and land were 2.5 times more in 1883 than they were five years earlier in 1879 and that the number of people who declared bankruptcy or had their land confiscated by compulsory sales rose 9.5 times and 57.7 times, respectively.352

With these statistics, Norman, who relied heavily on Mayet’s research, concludes that “the decade from 1880-1890, when the revised land tax was in full operation, was the period of the most spectacular shifts in landownership in Japan, and the fastest tempo in this social revolution

352 Mayet, 64.

213 was reached in 1884-1886.”353 However, as was previously mentioned, Norman suggested that this surplus population became stagnant because the rural Japanese landowner preferred to collect exorbitant rents rather than push the people off the land entirely. Thus, we can see how the conscription system made use of this stagnant population in rural Japan by slowly extracting random members of the peasant class into the national army.

Being brought into the fold of the conscript system, however, was only the first step in managing surplus populations. After conscripts completed their three years of active service, they were assigned to the reserves and were expected to return home.354 Unlike today there were no government social programs in place that assisted servicemen to re-enter the workforce and more likely than not, these men were not able to return to their former occupations. For those who worked the family farm, a three-year absence often jeopardized profit margins and many probably returned to find out that their parents were now tenant farmers or maybe even wage labourers. Without some form of work to return to, many of the discharged soldiers relocated to the city in search of employment as wage labourers. For many, the appeal of the city was also a product of the urban socialization of living on military bases. In 1908, of the seventy-six infantry regiments located across the country only sixteen of them were stationed on military bases that were not in or near cities.355 Thus, recruits became accustomed to the conveniences of life in the city, which probably would have drawn them back to the cities if they could not find work in the

353 Norman, Japan’s Emergence, 146.

354 Fujii Tadatoshi notes that, even though some soldiers preferred to stay in the cities near the bases from where they were discharged, they were urged to return to the countryside by the military. Fujii Tadatoshi, Zaigō Gunjinkai: Ryōhei Ryōmin kara Akagami, Gyokusai e (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2009), 33.

355 Takata, 87.

214 countryside. While there are no statistics to formerly prove this trend, Takata Yasuma makes some painstaking calculations tracing the likelihood that urbanization during the Meiji period was due in some extent to the migration of discharged soldiers.356 From this, we can conclude that while conscription utilized the stagnant surplus population to extract men from the countryside, it then acted to relocate this population in urban centers across Japan.357

This movement from the rural to urban, farmer to conscript, conscript to floating population, is important because it acts to both manage and then reproduce surplus populations.

Bringing together the theorization that was discussed in the previous section, the oscillation between included and excluded in relation to the citizen-subject is perhaps best exemplified by the life of the conscript. The precariousness of their life through military service alone is then multiplied by being reconstituted as a surplus population after their term of service. Nonetheless, given the conservative nature of the military and the status that military service was awarded across the nation, discharged soldiers rarely were a political force for revolutionary change despite the theoretical origins of universal conscription. This aspect was also addressed by Marx when discussing floating populations during the 1851 coup d’état in France as he included

356 The third chapter in Part II of The Conscription System looks at population levels in Sasebo (and later Kyoto, Tokyo and Kobe) in the late 1890s and early 1900s to deduce what percentage of new residents might have been discharged soldiers. He also looks at the number of reserves that report in larger cities and concludes that not all of these reserves would have originally been locals prior to being conscripted. 357 The rate of urbanization effectively doubled during the Meiji period beginning somewhere between 8-10% of the population and slowly increasing (1875—10-11%, 1886—12-13%, 1898—11.7%, 1903—14%, 1908—16%) to 16.3% in 1913. Statistics taken from the Cabinet Bureau of Statistics Japan (http://www.stat.go.jp/data/chouki/02.htm) Index 2-7, and Gilbert Rozman, “Castle Towns in Transition,” in Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji, edited by Marius Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 323. This argument is also made about urbanization in France during the early 1800s. See Ann M. Woodall, What Price the Poor? William Booth, Karl Marx and the London Residuum (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2005), 93.

215 discharged soldiers as one of the groups that formed la bohème which became a counterrevolutionary force of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.358

4.4 The Figure of the Soldier and Yasukuni

In conclusion, I want to return to Yasukuni Shrine to think about what this discussion on surplus populations might mean for the shrine’s history and how it can be employed to create a more productive critique particularly in how the figure of the soldier relates to the shrine. At the outset of the chapter, I used the Ōmura statue to introduce the concept of surplus populations through his role in both the formation of urban space as well as instituting universal conscription.

As I have argued, what links these two roles is how they are utilized to manage floating populations. Conscription facilitated a spatial reorganization of populations by plucking male

(predominantly poorer peasants) from the countryside and placing them into mainly urbanized military bases. Through this experience, soldiers were introduced to the disciplinary aspect of state power both in the camps and in the spatial organization of the city. However, this disciplinary affect was not simply a product of state education and military training or by actions carried out by agents of the state. The real disciplinary function of state power in the narrative of this chapter is in the systematic reproduction of a surplus population. By tracing how Yasukuni

Shrine fits into this historical process, it is evident that the figure of the soldier has a much more complicated relation to this state institution.

358 Marx goes on to describe the army as no longer being “the flower of the peasant youth; it is the swamp-flower of the peasant lumpenproletariat. It consists in large measure of remplacants, of substitutes, just as the second Bonaparte is himself only a remplacant, the substitute for Napoleon.” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 111-112.

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Throughout the Meiji period, war became an aspect of everyday life in a way that most

Japanese people had never experienced before. In just forty-five years, Japan had fought in three international wars (China in 1894-95, Boxer Uprising in 1901 and the Russo-Japanese War of

1904-5), one foreign expedition (Formosa in 1874), and five civil wars (Boshin from 1868-1871, rebellions in Saga in 1874, Hagi and Kumamoto in 1876, and Satsuma in 1877). That means a quarter of the Meiji period was in a state of warfare, which increasingly relied on young male bodies to feed into the war machine through universal conscription. With each passing war producing more war dead, the prominence of Yasukuni Shrine became more celebrated and well- known throughout the nation. Naturally these soldiers hold a special place in the history of

Yasukuni Shrine as their deaths formed the very rationale behind its conception. As the Meiji period progressed, what Takahashi Tetsuya calls the ‘Yasukuni Doctrine’ became a key feature of promoting the mourning of the war dead through proscribed rituals held at the shrine.359

While it is unlikely that the infamously uttered last words from soldiers “see you at Yasukuni” was ever used during the Meiji period, the shrine was definitely a place that was familiar to those in the military.

From 1890 onwards, the military manuals handed out to all conscripts included a brief history and description of Yasukuni Shrine. For soldiers who were stationed near Tokyo, there were also ample opportunities to take part in the festivals at the shrine and on occasion even drills were performed on the shrine grounds. Of course, for those soldiers who had friends and

359 As was stated in the first chapter, Takahashi Tetsuya argues that the concept of the Yasukuni Doctrine first appeared in the Jiji Shinpō on November 14, 1895, in an article titled, ‘We Should Hold a Grand Ceremony for the War Dead.’ The article argues that in contrast to the glory showered on the returning soldiers, the war dead and their bereaved families were shown no appreciation for their sacrifice and were forgotten by society. It concluded that they too should be given the highest honour possible so that they could participate in the celebration of victory and share a sense of national pride. Tetsuya Takahashi, “The National Politics of the Yasukuni Shrine”, trans. by Philip Seaton, Nationalisms in Japan, ed. Naoko Shimazu (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006), 168.

217 family die in the war it was expected that they would take the time to pay their respects to their fallen comrades. An example of this familiar type of fraternization in the military appears as early as 1877 when the Yomiuri Shinbun printed a story of soldiers who were spotted in front of the shrine with alcohol and tangerines (mikan) before heading towards Otowa (perhaps to go to the Toshimagaoka Cemetery).360 Thus another factor for the spread of the ‘Yasukuni Doctrine’ can also be attributed to soldiers who were likely to include Yasukuni Shrine in their stories regarding life in the army. However, this propping up of the soldier as the main protagonist of

Yasukuni within the state narrative only serves to help conceal the role of the soldier as a wage labourer.

Articulating military service as an expression of labour power is important because it displaces the state’s nationalist narrative which focusses on the soldier’s experience of war and instead gives agency to the soldier as someone who is involved in “making war”.361

Approaching the soldier as a labourer also recognizes the formal economic exchange that takes place as each soldier received a wage from the state. Thus thinking of universal conscription through surplus populations helps bring this aspect to the forefront since, as Marx noted, surplus populations are only relative to the necessary labour required by capitalist accumulation. So what does this say about Yasukuni Shrine? How does it fit into this discussion of surplus populations?

First of all, I believe that this approach can help re-evaluate the shrine’s position in relation to the figure of the soldier. Instead of appealing to Yasukuni Shrine simply as a

360 Yomiuri Shinbun, morning edition page 2, November 29, 1877. 361 The labour historian Peter Way uses this term to make the distinction between the traditional approach of narrating the soldier’s relation to war as an experience as opposed to being an agent of war. Peter Way, “Memoirs of an Invalid: James Miller and the Making of the British-American Empire in the Seven Years’ War,” edited by Donna Haverty-Stacke and Daniel J. Walkowitz Rethinking U.S. Labor History: Essays in the Working-Class Experience, 1756 - 2009, (New York: Continuum, 2010), 27.

218 memorial to the war dead, focussing on surplus populations and conscription captures a more accurate telling of the soldier’s experience that begins with the conscription exams and not with their deaths. Secondly, through the history of conscription during the Meiji period as was described in this chapter, the shrine emerges as a node in the management of surplus populations.

If the conditions for universal conscription were made possible by the emergence of a surplus population then conscription is also a form of managing this population. This management continued after the soldier’s three years of active service as they were discharged back into civilian life most likely to find themselves once again within this floating population. Thus the shrine is a site that also commemorates the management of surplus populations as is represented by the Ōmura statue.

Finally, by interrogating the discourse of military service as a patriotic civic duty that helps form the foundation for nineteenth and twentieth century nationalism, this study of surplus populations and conscription shows how the idea of the nation functions to smooth over the contradictions of a capitalist economy. Specifically, in Japan, the devastating effect that the land reforms had on rural peasants increasingly became a problem for the state during the late nineteenth century. With the emergence of a relative surplus population came riots and revolts across rural Japan that threatened the Meiji state’s legitimacy. Universal conscription not only provided the military power to put down these revolts and secure state power but it also coded a section of this floating population by bringing them under the wing of the nation-state. Literally clothed in national symbols, these peasants-cum-soldiers from all across Japan gave life to the idea of the nation during the Meiji period.

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Epilogue: What Does Yasukuni Shrine Commemorate?

The social revolution… cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition in regard to the past... [they] must let the dead bury their dead.

-Karl Marx362

In June of 1875, just three years after a permanent inner sanctuary was completed on the

Yasukuni Shrine grounds, the foundation stone was laid for the Basilica of the Sacred Heart

(Sacré-Coeur) in Paris. While the histories of these two religious spaces seemingly have little in common besides sharing the same temporal moment, an examination of Yasukuni Shrine and the

Basilica of the Sacred Heart offers some interesting parallels.363 For example, both structures were built on the top of a hill in their respective national capitals making them prominent landmarks within the city. Not only were these two religious structures visible to people in the city going about their daily business, but, from their vantage point on top of the hill, the city became visible as a whole. This mapping of the city from an elevated position allowed the subject, in the words of David Harvey, to “possess the city in imagination instead of being possessed by it.”364 Thus, both Yasukuni Shrine and the Basilica of the Sacred Heart played a role in allowing the residents of Tokyo and Paris to see the urban process, in which their

362 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 12-13. 363 In a volume of collected essays these two cities were historically contrasted with each other by examining the relation between power and space in giving shape to their early modern manifestations. See Edo and Paris: Urban Life and the State in the Early Modern Era, edited by James L. McClain, John M. Merriman, and Ugawa Kaoru (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). 364 David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989), 1.

220 everyday life was a part of, unfold. The other parallel that I want to explore is how they are both examples of the operation of Capital-Nation-State.

David Harvey has written extensively on the urban history of Paris including a chapter on the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. In this chapter, he engages with the class politics of the

Commune which led to the construction of the basilica on the hill of Montmartre. Seeing that the church memorializes the events of 1871, Harvey rightfully asks, exactly what aspect of this history does the Basilica of the Sacred Heart commemorate? Within the answer to this question I believe there are some important correlations that can be drawn with Yasukuni Shrine and the history that I have presented in this dissertation.

The history of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart corresponds with the fall of the French

Second Empire under Napoleon III and the emergence of the French Third Republic. Thus, it was born in a moment of political turbulence not unlike the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the rise of the Meiji State. With Napoleon III having been captured in September of 1870 and the

Prussians still advancing on the city of Paris, the interim government found itself in a difficult position to assert its authority. Not only did it have to deal with an advancing foreign enemy, but, it also had to negotiate the various class interests and political loyalties that were battling for power in the capital. On the one side, the government had to fight off the monarchists, who were much more enthusiastic about capitulating to the Prussians than working with a republican government. At the same time, they had to appease a strong working class coalition that had taken up the nationalist cause in hopes that a republican government would serve their interests by instituting municipal elections. In the end, they managed to disappoint both sides by continuing the war with the Prussians as they laid siege to Paris while doing little to support the working class, despite their rallying efforts to defend the city. In January of 1871, an armistice

221 was declared and it was announced that national elections would be held the following month in order to elect a new government. However, the peace agreement with Prussia did not equate peace for those in the city of Paris.

To fully understand the politics behind the construction of the Basilica of the Sacred

Heart, the actors involved in this story need to be introduced. Before the siege of Paris by the

Prussians in September of 1870, many of its richest residents had decided to flee the city to the provinces. This meant that the working class population was left behind to defend Paris and they were determined to take advantage of the political instability caused by the siege of the city.

Their main goal was to push forward their demands for municipal elections in order to obtain a proper representation of working class interests in the government. The bourgeoisie, who had fled the city to escape the looming urban war, were now at risk of losing their wealth as well. So they needed to find a way to undermine the political aspirations of the Commune. Fortunately, they found their solution waiting for them in the vast expanse of rural France. As Harvey suggests, the tensions between the urban-rural divide aligned perfectly along class divisions, as the bourgeois found a willing ally in the conservative monarchism of the countryside against the radical working class of Paris.365 When the national elections were called in February of 1871, the bourgeoisie united with the rural vote in favour of the monarchists to form a majority. With this conservative alliance, the new government sought to break the radicalism of the working class by fighting them on the streets of Paris as well as on the symbolic hill of Montmartre.366

365 In particular, Harvey points to the relation between Paris and an emerging global economy that produced massive wealth in the city, which, from the position of their rural counterpart, signified the decadence of a social and moral decline. At the same time, these antagonisms reproduced themselves in the space of the city as working class quarters like Belleville became a nesting-ground for social unrest. Harvey, The Urban Experience, 206. 366 Parisians formed their own elections and declared the Commune on March 28, 1871. In April, the city was once again under siege but this time by its own national government. The Commune proved no match for the French

222

The conservative alliance that was formed among the bourgeoisie, a predominantly catholic rural population, along with the monarchists, is a perfect example of the historical operation of Capital-Nation-State. The unification of these three groups was utilized to defeat a radical movement which threatened the very basis of this social triad and can teach us something of the nature of this historical social formation. As Karatani argued, a capitalist economy will always create inequality, which is expressed through class conflict and needs to be mitigated by the operations of the nation and the state. This is why transcending capitalism must also deal with these two other social forms, which dominate how our world is structured. It is also why a critique of the political economy of Yasukuni Shrine is essential for forming a politics that can transcend the problems expressed through the ‘Yasukuni Issue’.

Without a critique of Yasukuni’s relation to capital, the shrine can only be seen as a superstructure of the state, as ideology, while its social function is hidden behind the discourse of defining the boundaries of community (nation). However, as the first chapter suggested through an examination of crime on the shrine grounds, this narrative was disrupted through the everyday as citizens of this national community were confronted by the inequalities produced by the commodity mode of exchange. Thus, we can see how the fusing of nation and state to capital contains a necessary social function as they act to smooth over the excesses or disparities that are produced by a capitalist economy. Throughout the rest of this dissertation, the focus turned to

Army which gave no mercy to the Parisians as they meticulously swept through the city. In what became known as the ‘bloody week’ (Semaine Sanglante), over 20,000 Parisians were either killed in the fighting or summarily executed in the streets according to one of the Commune’s first historians Prosper-Olivier Lissagaray in 1872 (although this number is highly debated and ranges from as low as 7000 all the way to 50,000). Also the number used by Benedict Anderson, “In the World-Shadow of Bismarck and Nobel,” New Left Review Vol. 28 (July, 2004), 94.

223 how Capital-Nation-State was a symbiotic relation, meaning that the nation and state also became dependent on capital. At a time when the Meiji government could not afford to make

Yasukuni Shrine into the grand spectacle that it later became after winning major international wars, the state relied heavily on monetary donations above and beyond the taxes that they forcefully collected. These donations would not have been possible without a commodity economy that was mediated by money as well as the entertainment on the shrine grounds that made Yasukuni financially viable. The state also benefitted from the role that the shrine played in the emerging Tokyo land market through its impact on raising ground rent and, thus, shaping the organization of space in adjacent neighbourhoods. Land markets did more than just give shape to the built environment of the city, as the commodification of land also resulted in the production of a work force that now had to depend on exchanging their labour power for a wage in order to subsist. This historical freeing of the peasants from their feudal chains overlapped with the discourse of universal conscription and the formation of a national citizen-subject, which helped define the spatial boundaries of the nation. Thus, an understanding of the historical process of capitalism is integral for unfolding how the nation and state operate today.

While this project focussed on Yasukuni Shrine during the Meiji period, I believe that this critique can be extended to the current moment as well. As was discussed in the introduction, the contemporary debates over the shrine are very polemical and tend to result in a stalemate in terms of producing some type of resolution to the ‘Yasukuni Issue’. Much like the everyday, these debates contain a certain reproducibility through which issues like the apologies or the visits by Prime Ministers appear in cycles. While political scientists can debate the circumstances and arguments for and against such actions, it does little to critique the larger structures that produce the possibility for these problems to historically emerge. An example of how my own approach might open up a new space to rethink this problem can be seen by looking at the issue

224 of visits by prime ministers in order to note how the contradictions that emerge within the space of the shrine operate through the Capital-Nation-State triad. The visits to Yasukuni Shrine on

August 15th, by Prime Ministers Nakasone in 1985 and Koizumi in 2006, were both undertaken amid extensive privatization initiatives. These austerity measures by the government were generally met with opposition from the public and so the visits to Yasukuni Shrine can be understood as a way to smooth over the disparities that privatization further made visible.

However, such actions tend to produce a reciprocal problem, such as when the nation appears as an excess through the outcries of Koreans and Chinese over the Japanese state’s position on

Yasukuni and it spills into the realm of commodity exchange through boycotts and disruptions in the flow of capital. Once again the contradictions present at Yasukuni Shrine point to how the shrine, as an ideological apparatus, is a failure, but a failure that can be maintained by the operation of Capital-Nation-State. This shows that the ‘Yasukuni Issue’ cannot be resolved through a critique of the nation or state alone, just as the history of the shrine is not complete with an understanding of how this space was produced by capital. Thus, a critique of the political economy of Yasukuni Shrine is not only an integral component for understanding its historical emergence, but also for forming a politics that does not simply reproduce the problems presented by the social form of Capital-Nation-State.

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