Everyday Fascism in Contemporary Japan Etsko Kasai
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Everyday Fascism in Contemporary Japan Etsko Kasai Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2013 ©2013 Etsko Kasai All rights reserved Abstract Everyday Fascism in Contemporary Japan Etsko Kasai This dissertation uses the concept of fascism in order to examine the socio-culture of contemporary Japan. Defined in terms of its commodity structure, fascism turns out to be a relevant concept to Japan not only prior to and during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945) but also from the postwar days to date. Against various forms of culturalism that claim that the country is essentially totalitarian and its culture is innately violent, I will argue that the country has shared fascist conditions with those other countries and regions that operate in the mode of mechanical reproduction. While the overall mode of mass-reproduction has been further articulated by different moments, such as late capitalism or post-modernism, the cultural and political condition of reducing singular lives and events into standardized forms has continued in these countries and regions roughly since the 1920s. My view will expand the horizon of studies of fascism, which has hitherto been limited to Europe between the two World Wars. At the same time, the view of fascism’s generality should not be blind to local inflections and historical specificities. In this dissertation, I will examine such trans-war Japanese institutions as the ideologies of emperorship, formation of the petty bourgeois class, and corporatist organizations of gender and locality. My dissertation will ethnographically investigate the way in which these institutions have interacted with the country’s modern capitalist everyday to result in fascist violence. The specific sites in which my ethnographies take place are the contemporary Tokyo and Yokohama suburbs (Chapters 1 and 3) and the Yasukuni Shinto Shrine in Tokyo (Chapters 2 and 4), among others. These ethnographies will elucidate how the categories of class, gender, and generation crisscross everyday pleasures and anxieties of commodification. Lastly and not least importantly, another historically specific element of postwar Japanese fascism is memories and traces of its prewar violence exercised on other Asians and Pacific Islanders. The problem of ill mourning seems to critically ground the postwar Japanese formation of fascist potentialities. The last chapter will discuss contemporary Japanese efforts for mourning and the accompanying issue of ethics. Contents Acknowledgements ii Prologue iv Introduction: Fascism as a Mass Phenomenon 1 1. The Emperor’s Infants Now 26 2. Theories of Delay: The Petty Bourgeois Formation of Postwar Fascism 95 3. Incorporating the Everyday: Or, the Corporatist Representation of War Machines 175 4. Internet Fascism and Resurgence of the Grassroots 245 5. Disruptions: Other Voices and Mournful Responses 300 Conclusion: Anthropology of Fascism, Fascism of Anthropology 370 Bibliography 383 i Acknowledgements This dissertation owes its theoretical inspirations to my advisor, Marilyn Ivy, committee members, Rosalind Morris and Partha Chatterjee, and readers, Harry Harootunian and Naoki Sakai. They were also generous about their time and patient about my progress. Without their help, I would not have completed this project. My fieldworks were variously funded by Sheldon Scheps Summer Fellowship, Weatherhead Ph.D. Training Grant, and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program. Social Science Research Council Japan Studies Dissertation Workshop helped me build the chapter structure. In the field, Shōji Yamada, Jun Nishikawa, Tetsu Sadotomo, and others showed their interests in my project and provided me with precious advise. Doojin Kim, Takashi and Maki Mita, and other colleagues discussed with me various issues arising from fieldworks. The following informants were pivotal in the field yet either buried or invisible in the text⎯ Kiko Koizumi, Yume Fuse, and other socialist feminists at I-Women’s Conference: Keiichi Tsuneishi, Yasushi Torii, Minoru Koshida, Kazuyuki Kawamura, Hiromitsu Masuda, and others in the Association to Investigate into the Problem of Those Remains That Were Discovered in the Ruins of the [Former] Military Medical School [in Shinjuku, Tokyo]: Pastors Shinji Kayama at the Rokkaku-bashi Church and Ken Imai at the Tokyo Church: Hesom Cho, a daughter of a Korean survivor of the imperial Japanese labor camps: Yasuko Nakatani, a former plaintiff against the state of Japan for its consecration of her late Self-Defense-Force husband: and all others who treated me as their fictive kin to borrow an ethnographical metaphor. ii During the period of writing up, Michelle Shafer and Audrey Walton read parts of my work and provided comments. I thank all of them for their kind contributions, though all the mistakes are solely my own. iii Prologue Suggestively perhaps, the date and location are vague. It was some time during my early graduate years, somewhere in the so-called “graduate ghetto,” that is, roughly between Whitney Avenue and State Street in downtown New Haven. Over potluck dishes and international beers, a small number of us were wound down in the couch, remotely hearing silly laughter from the kitchen. “Doug” was as loaded as any one of us, which made him oddly quiet and melancholic. I am not sure how we ended up in talking about it, but when I noticed, he was describing some details of a set of action figures comprised of American and German soldiers from the Second World War. “And here were commanders pointing their fingers at their lieutenants; and there were soldiers with rifles, bazookas, and machineguns. Some were the snipers on their stomach; others were about to throw their grenades,” he spread out the imaginary map. According to him, the Germans had been painted black and the Americans had been green⎯fifty pieces each. The little Doug would line them up neatly so that they would look realistic in their positions, under artificial trees and on paper grass. He would look at them tirelessly, everyday. He had never even played with them, according to him⎯“the point was their order, I guess.” The line and order, starting from the commanders and ending in infantries, however, had not lasted forever, as he might have wished. One day, one of his classmates had come to play with the figures. The order had been scrambled; one of the German commanders had even gone missing⎯as it would turn out, forever. “John Doe!” the grown-up Doug in the New Haven party quietly shouted the name of the classmate from long ago and shook his head. iv The talk was becoming pointless and everyone started to go to the kitchen to get the freshly baked cookies. It is obvious that Doug’s story is one of those insignificant, party talks that people might make late at night to sound intimate, to repel sleepiness. As for me, I am not sure why I even remember the story. Even now, I occasionally think of the otherwise complete set of Doug’s soldiers, ninety-nine in all, whose lost perfection apparently still haunts him. I imagine the miniature soldiers’ plastic bodies, their eternal poses in Doug’s parents’ dark basement, somewhere in the middle of the Midwestern surrealism, in its tornado-pregnant tranquility. Perhaps now it is me who is haunted, if not by the soldiers, then by the perceived bizarreness of a child who is obsessed with the organization of, rather than the interaction with, action figures. But who can actually tell that I am not obsessed with the soldiers, the pleasure and fear of their meticulous organization per se? This dissertation, entitled “Everyday Fascism in Contemporary Japan,” was written in the shadow of these eternal soldiers, as my mind kept going back to their images, seeking clues and inspirations. v 1 Introduction: Fascism as a Mass Phenomenon This dissertation recasts contemporary Japan using the theoretical concept of fascism and the analytical category of class. Conventionally, studies of fascism have marginalized Japan as their subject, calling the pre-World War Two Japanese polity “authoritarianism,” for instance.1 Conventional studies have also been cautious about considering as their subjects any movements or discourses that are observed after the 1920-40s.2 In this dissertation, I adopt the position that fascism is a general phenomenon beyond the European continent and the period of the two World Wars. The argument as to the generality of fascism has grown out of the insight that fascism is a phenomenon of modernity and capitalism.3 Commodity logic, on which modern capitalism is based, abstracts, “equalizes,” and totalizes singular things and humans as values, while marking each value as different from others.4 The argument is that fascism radically accentuates these 1 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); pp.328-354. 2 One of the most articulate denials of the generality of fascism comes from the historian Gilbert Allardyce in his “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,” American Historical Review, 84 (1979): 367- 388. Payne (Ibid.) similarly limits the phenomenon of fascism to the geography of Western Europe and the time period of the1920-40s, when he considers South African Ossewabrandwag, for instance. According to him, it is merely “protofascism.” Latin American fascism such as the Chilean National Socialist Movement is likewise fas- cism that is “copied” and “quickly failed.” Walter Laqueur, in his Fascism: Past, Present, Future (New York: Ox- ford University Press, 1996), uses a broader net than these two do, with which he tries to grasp such diversified re- gimes and movements as Soviet communism, Islamic fundamentalism, or European neofascism in terms of fascism, yet confusingly, without a theoretically rigorous definition of fascism. 3 See Jun Tosaka, Nihon ideology-ron: Gendai Nihon ni okeru Nihon-shugi, Fascism, Jiyū-shugi,Shisō no Hihan (Tokyo: Hakuyō-sha, 1938(1935)); Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc- tion,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed.