Chapter 1: Imagining national identity The power and efficacy of the nation as a foundation for political, social and cultural identity has been an enduring concern of scholars throughout the twentieth century. 1 The nation’s centrality to identity formation has been accepted, but accounting for the ways in which its discursive borders are conceived and articulated remains uncertain. In this chapter I will engage some of the primary ways in which nation formation, and the nation’s endurance as a frame for identity, has been considered. In many ways the overarching theories about identity formation are prone to abstraction, and often disguise the myriad ways in which identity is determined and contested. The question of who speaks for the nation is a concern that can only really be deciphered by turning to the particular temporal and spatial sites of its enunciation. The intellectual debates of the 1950s and 60s in Japan over autonomy and modernity provide us with one such intellectual and political arena through which to consider the competing ideas that underpin the efficacy and endurance of the nation in Japan. 2 The debates reveal that the continuing resonance of the nation as a basis for identity is founded not simply on the power or hegemony of the political elite but on the stories and ideals exposed in the nation’s various imaginings. 1 See for example Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World , Verso, London, 1998; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1983; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982; Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories , Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1993; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991; Ernst Gellner, Nations and Nationalism , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983; Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations , Blackwell, Oxford, 1986; 2 In his book Dreams of Difference Kevin Doak turns to the notion of ‘ethnic nationalism’ as a basis for identity formation in Japan divorced from ‘official nationalism.’ It highlights the competing ways in which the nation is imagined as the basis of identity. See Kevin Doak, Dreams of Difference: The Japan Romantic School and the Crisis of Modernity , University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994, pp. xi-x1iii. 29 In this chapter I will explore the space that provocative intellectual and literary critic Yoshimoto Takaaki (1924-) and other intellectuals of the postwar period opened up for the formation and articulation of national identity. 3 The ideas emanating from the leftist intellectual debates during this period reveal a fervent desire to shape the foundations of postwar national identity and direct the character of political renewal. In the 1950s and 1960s the work of Maruyama Masao, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Tsurumi Shunsuke, Oda Makoto and Yoshimoto Takaaki exemplified the centrality of modernity and autonomy to conceptions of the postwar national imaginary. The nation emerged as a discursive site in which visions of pluralism, agency, activism and resistance were brought to life. Who speaks for the nation? Histories of the 20th century are indelibly inscribed with the imprint of the nation and its imaginings. In Japan, the defense of nation and sovereignty led millions to their death in war; the nation’s boundaries have framed political, social and cultural institutions; and national histories have enveloped personal and communal memories. 4 While the nation’s future longevity cannot be assured its centrality to the twentieth century is in little doubt. A number of scholars have examined the continuing resonance of the nation’s political, social and cultural institutions and the way that its borders shape community and identity. They have turned to the institutions of the state in order to account for the power encased in its discursive borders. Scholars such as Weber, Hobsbawm, Gellner, and Breuilly have dislodged the nation from its 3 The humanist and ‘internationalist’ intellectuals (otherwise known as ‘progressive’) referred to people such as Tsurumi Shunsuke, Maruyama Masao, Takeuchi Yoshimi, Fujita Sh ōzō, Kuno Osamu and Hashikawa Buns ō. They were the prominent liberal intellectuals of the period.Yoshimoto Takaaki, ‘Nihon no nashonarizumu,’ in Yoshimoto Takaaki (ed.), Nashonarizumu , Gendai Nihon Shis ō Taikei, 5, Iwanami Shoten, Tokyo, 1964, pp. 7-55. 4 See for example, William Beasley, The Modern History of Japan , Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1973; John W. Hall et al (eds.) The Cambridge History of Japan , Cambridge University Press, New York, 1988-1999; Janet Hunter, The Emergence of Modern Japan: An Introductory History Since 1853 , Longman, New York, 1989; G. Sansom, History of Japan , 1958; Richard Storry, A History of Modern Japan , Penguin Books, England, 1968. 30 ‘objective,’ essentialist foundations, and highlighted the contingency of its political construction. 5 Challenging the representation of the nation as a pre- modern or ‘natural’ basis for identity, these scholars have highlighted the elemental role of political leaders in fashioning and in some cases imposing the conceptual and geographic boundaries of the nation. They have illustrated the ways in which industrialization, technological development, the centralization of power, and imperialism, have facilitated the formulation and dissemination of shared values, ethnic homogeneity and unbroken kinship lines, across a clearly delineated geographic terrain. Nationalism has been deemed a crucial factor in this process. Theorists have shown that by making recourse to a shared history, a clear and traceable genealogy for the nation and its people, and a concurrent feeling of solidarity, political leaders have used nationalism in order to justify their authority, define and often extend the nation’s borders, and nurture a sense of identity in the territory over which they claim sovereignty. Nationalism operates as a tool through which a national identity is transmitted across time and space colonizing both the past and the future with identities that are in fact specific to the period in which they manifest themselves. Anthony Giddens goes so far as to suggest that through the ‘processes of allocation, delimitation, demarcation and administration’ it is the institutions of the modern state that underpin the continuing existence of the nation and its centrality to inter nation al politics (my emphasis). 6 Eric Hobsbawm accounts for the nation’s resilience as a basis for identity by highlighting the state’s ‘invention of tradition.’ Hobsbawm notes that in spite of recourse to the ‘remotest antiquity’ and ‘natural human communities’ that 5 Max Weber, ‘The concept of ethnicity: what is an ethnic group,’ in M.Guibernau & J. Rex, (eds.) The Ethnicity Reader: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Migration, Polity Press, Blackwell Publishers, UK, 1997; John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State , Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1982; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991. 6 Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism , University of California Press, Berkeley, 1985. 31 pervades representations of the nation, it is an identity established and sustained by the ‘invention of tradition.’ 7 The notion of ‘invented traditions’ refers to the way in which an ideological agenda is artificially linked to the past, and to the uses of ‘tradition’ within contemporary political discourse. Hobsbawm concurs with modernists such as Ernest Gellner stating that ‘nations as a natural god-given way of classifying men, as an inherent … political destiny are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures.’ 8 In this sense nationalism operates like a photograph or museum piece - capturing people, places and ideas at a fixed moment and displaying them as evidence of an enduring culture and identity. The ability of leaders to control the past, to write history and invent tradition, greatly enhances the efficacy of the nation as a basis for identity. One of the limitations of the term ‘invention’ is that it assumes a choice between the invention and authenticity of tradition and identity; it suggests that the nation threatens truth and that a genuine or real tradition exists and can be identified by an objective historian. Hobsbawm writes: ‘I cannot but add that no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist … nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. As Renan said: “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”’ 9 In more recent discussion on the nation scholars have embraced the notion of ‘imagined communities’ and the ‘national phantasm’ in order to expose the myths that justify political authority, and account for the nation’s endurance as 7 The ‘invention of tradition’ refers to more than simply nation formation though this is where it has often been employed. See Eric Hobsbawm & Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984. 8 Ernest Gellner quoted in Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , 10. See also Ernst Gellner, Nations